New study suggests that cuing norms may not work in every context - and could backfire. Several RCTs offer strong evidence that signaling norms has prosocial outcomes, but norms-cuing may only work, e.g., w/ the right message or w/ knowledge of enforcement. files-www.mis.mpg.de/mpi-typo3/So...

Constructing and standardizing strong measures is critical for a field to build knowledge about harms and solutions. A tremendous effort by the Oxford Internet Institute, involving 42 researchers, show that LLMs may have serious measurement ("benchmark") problem. www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/...

Model science here. Finds that nudges work in a survey experiment - but then discovers mostly null effects when tested in a more ecologically valid setting. Kudos to authors and editors for a) pipelining to ecologically valid settings and b) publishing null results. tinyurl.com/5dmjr8v9

Bsky announced it will start testing "dislikes" letting users privately signal types of content they want to see less of. Negative feedback is an important way to give people agency in shaping their feed and online experience, but the word "dislike" may inadvertently.... bsky.social/about/blog/1...

Imagine sophisticated social media feed algorithms - but built with users' and communities' wellbeing in mind. There's now an ambitious team trying to make that reality. greenearthsocial.substack.com/p/introducin...

Seriously impressed with the two high school students who built an ML-driven app to short-circuit teens' smartphone dopamine loop. www.primeopenaccess.com/scholarly-ar...

Instagram rolls out giving users more control over their Reels algorithm: www.socialmediatoday.com/news/instagr...

According to new Pew data, mass social media continues to be central to our national public square - with over 50% of Americans getting at least some of their news from social media sites, and YouTube & TikTok taking a larger share. (Only 2% of us here at Bsky.) www.pewresearch.org/journalism/f...

The reactions platforms choose aren't neutral; they can cue division or inspire curiosity and understanding. So it's great to see Sparkable put "prosocial reactions" front and center. blog.sparkable.cc/prosocial-re...

New study challenges the conventional wisdom that anonymity and prosocial behavior are at odds. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Meta update on Community Notes. Interestingly they've added a feature to alert users who previously engaged with a post that a Community Note was later added. That's important because Notes most often don't appear until well into a post's life-cycle. www.socialmediatoday.com/news/meta-ad...

Pinterest is expanding its school-hour prompt to "take a break" from the app. We're not aware of internal tests, but research suggests these interventions can be effective at reducing time on distracting apps (www.prosocialdesign.org/library/digi...). www.socialmediatoday.com/news/pintere...

A paper from over a year ago: research participants were only able to correctly identify AI agents from humans in an online discussion 42% of the time (even when told to expect AI agents). Odds are that percentage would be much lower today. arxiv.org/html/2402.07...

An RCT with 269 Danish teens shows that two smartphone interventions - forcing a brief breathing exercise or asking teens to plan the length of their session - dropped social media phone use 36%. A third intervention, asking them to reflect on their use, had no effect. en.kfst.dk/media/5t4dsc...

One platform is taking steps to keep its engagement authentic and bot-lite: www.socialmediatoday.com/news/linkedi...

More ways GenAI is working for the public good: blog.cosmos-institute.org/p/introducin...

It comes up a lot in conversations at PDN: how would you create a measure of platform prosociality? It looks like Rachel Kowert has been thinking for a while along the same lines, but in games. A thoughtful read from an expert gaming T&S. rachelkowert.substack.com/p/developing...

We love a literature review. This one looks at how tech interventions - everything from social media reduction to conversation robots - can reduce loneliness and isolation. 40 RCTs with mixed results - and group psychological interventions (below) for the win. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Casey Newton charts one small - but promising - step in building the fediverse (which - in concept - could free users from platform fiefdoms). www.platformer.news/threads-fedi...

Something to keep an eye on: According to CJR, Digg is reinventing itself using AI/LLM-fueled content moderation that look like they could include some prosocial interventions, like intervening to de-escalate tense conversations, "allowing users to dig deeper." www.cjr.org/analysis/new...

We've shared before about efforts to foster "Better Feeds" that create long-term value - as opposed to short-term dopamine hits - for users. One strategy is to rely on user surveys (over, say, clicks) - an approach Pinterest recently wrote about from their experience: medium.com/pinterest-en...

A year in the making, the Council on Technology and Social Cohesion's Blueprint on "Prosocial Tech Design Governance" is out - and gives platforms and policy makers a guide to building spaces that foster social cohesion, "the glue that holds society together." toda.org/assets/files...

One of the critiques of Community Notes is that they can be gamed - and so can be biased. It looks like X has taken note: www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-forme...

Japan may be ahead of the curve in using AI to foster healthy discussions. Yahoo! News, one of Japan's most popular sites, suggests ways users can rephrase their comments to be more constructive - going back to last fall. www.thepickool.com/yahoo-news-j...

TikTok looks like it's taking teen sleep seriously - by adding default guided meditation for anyone under 18 opening their app after 10pm. Even more surprising: in tests they say 98% of teens keep meditating. (18+ can also turn on default meditation after hours.) newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/tiktok...

If you work in the Trust & Safety field in academia, industry, civil society (nonprofit) or government (policymaker) and are looking for informal or formal cross-sector collaborations - the Trust and Safety Foundation just started a pilot "Matchmaking" program to help connect you:

Douyin, like its international counterpart TikTok, uses "health use reminders" to cut down on phone addiction. A new survey of Chinese college students suggests why they may not be working... www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

It looks like Pinterest is testing an intervention that prompts teens not to use the app during school hours. We hope they make their test results public! www.socialmediatoday.com/news/pintere...

Just discovered CLR:SKY, a Bsky add-on that builds on SO many promising trends in prosocial design: (1) using LLMs and (2) middleware to (3) empower us all to (4) have more productive - and healthier - conversations on line. www.clrsky.ai

Great new report from Devika Malik and the Toda Peace Institute on the state of prosocial regulation in the Global South. techandsocialcohesion.org/wp-content/u...

Great to see Alice Hunsberger @ Everything in moderation ask the question "Is it prosocial design's time to shine?" You know our answer!

New preprint takes a creative approach to reducing the spread of disinformation (and possibly outrage-laden posts) - by drawing people's attention to the emotional content of a post. Extra plus: it's non-Western study (this one's from Japan). arxiv.org/pdf/2503.24037

The Verge asked 2,000 people what they wanted from digital spaces. Their answer: (small) communities and (human) connection. docs.google.com/presentation...

Matt Motyl breaks down why user engagement signals (likes, clicks, etc.) aren't a good predictor of what users *value* - with a bowl of chips... youtu.be/Dy_0zbMJWbw?...

New report from the Council on Tech and Social Cohesion on "upstream approaches to tackling technology-facilitated gender-based violence." A great overview of pro-active and prosocial design solutions applied to one of today's most urgent challenges. techandsocialcohesion.org/wp-content/u...

Report from Pinterest helps make the case that giving users a positive experience is in a platform's self-interest (or, in this case, self-pinterest?). business.pinterest.com/en-au/blog/h...

For fans of "data portability" (i.e. empowering users to move between social media platforms), it looks like Threads is trying to make it easy for people to "import" their X network. Not clear this is sustainable model, but a step in the right direction? www.socialmediatoday.com/news/threads...

New in the Library: "Open Minded Badges" aim to promote intellectual humility and productive online conversations. Although we only find tentative evidence they're effective, we're excited to see research of proactive, prosocial designs - and hope to see more! www.prosocialdesign.org/library/open...

It's a good day when a couple of top researchers say we need to invest more in a research agenda for prosocial design. We couldn't agree more! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We recently reviewed a design - Post Guidance - that lets subreddits give in-time feedback if people are breaking a subreddit rule (which results in more high quality posts). Now it looks like Reddit has riffed and expanded on that idea - hopefully w/ similar results. redditinc.com/blog/making-...

There's agreement that engagement-based feeds create harms for individuals and society and reverse chronological feeds are sub-optimal and unrealistic alternatives. KGI's report offers guidelines - centered on transparency, agency, evidence and long-term user value - for building healthier feeds.

Integrity Institute read through all those platform DSA filings, so we didn't have to. Great report, with good primers on transparency regulations (from EU, UK and Oz). drive.google.com/file/d/1MJHx...

It's a good day for Responsible Tech: Columbia's Tooling Consortium just unveiled its initial "awesome" github resource for robust open online safety tools (ROOST). Creating healthy spaces online just got a little easier. github.com/roostorg/awe...

Friction is often proposed as a way to stem the spread of misinformation. This 2024 study suggests that it *does* decrease reshares of misinfo, but there's a big downside; it may reduce reshares of high-factual information even more. academic.oup.com/ej/advance-a...

New in the PDN Library: There's convincing evidence that "Post Guidance", which gives users in-time feedback and a chance to course-correct when they may be breaking a subreddit norm, can increase overall quality content. Effective prosocial design in action. www.prosocialdesign.org/library/post...

Hyper partisan content thrives on social media, increasing affective polarisation and poisoning political discourse. Our new paper @lewan.bsky.social, @almogsi.bsky.social, Dawn Holford, just out in @commspsychol.bsky.social, finds that inoculation interventions may help us tackle the problem. 🧵

Pluralist recommender systems are in the air - and global! - with two new papers this week from teams in Japan and Pakistan on how AI can help media companies "present diverse perspectives to their readers." ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/doc..., www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

What does the evidence say about what's effective at decreasing misinformation - Fact-Checking or Community Notes? We've reviewed dozens of studies over the past two years and, while Notes have the edge, both have limitations. Our new review of the evidence: www.prosocialdesign.org/blog/primer-...

For those trying to understand the impact of the Meta switch from Fact-Checking Labels to Community Notes, our recently updated evidence-based library entries on both interventions should be helpful: www.prosocialdesign.org/library/labe... www.prosocialdesign.org/library/crow...

Community Notes are one of the most effective ways to reduce the spread of misinformation - but they have a scalability problem. This promising study gets around that scalability issue with an LLM that mimics Community Notes and - in tests - may even be more effective. arxiv.org/pdf/2411.06116