Tweetment Effects on the Tweeted Experimentally Reducing Racist Harassment

• Published in: Political behavior Vol. 39; no. 3; pp. 629 - 649
• Main Author: Munger, Kevin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer Science + Business Media 01.09.2017; Springer US; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Audiences; Cyberbullying; Data collection; Ethnic identity; Ethnocentrism; Experiments; Group norms; Harassment; Internet; Intervention; Males; Minority groups; Obscenity; ORIGINAL PAPER; Political Science; Political Science and International Relations; Political Science and International Studies; Racial harassment; Racism; Social media; Social networks; Social psychology; Sociology; Online harassment; Randomized field experiment; Social media; Social identity
• ISSN: 0190-9320; 1573-6687
• DOI: 10.1007/s11109-016-9373-5

I conduct an experiment which examines the impact of group norm promotion and social sanctioning on racist online harassment. Racist online harassment de-mobilizes the minorities it targets, and the open, unopposed expression of racism in a public forum can legitimize racist viewpoints and prime ethnocentrism. I employ an intervention designed to reduce the use of anti-black racist slurs by white men on Twitter. I collect a sample of Twitter users who have harassed other users and use accounts I control (“bots”) to sanction the harassers. By varying the identity of the bots between in-group (white man) and out-group (black man) and by varying the number of Twitter followers each bot has, I find that subjects who were sanctioned by a high-follower white male significantly reduced their use of a racist slur. This paper extends findings from lab experiments to a naturalistic setting using an objective, behavioral outcome measure and a continuous 2-month data collection period. This represents an advance in the study of prejudiced behavior.