Negative content and behaviours propagate quickly on social media: every day we see sad or disturbing news from all around the world, witness disagreements turn into arguments and name-calling in the comment sections and get bombarded with negative content that gets constantly shared by news sources, social media pages and our own contacts. Unfortunately, it seems common that viewers on social media networks are exposed to a lot of anger, sadness and similar detrimental emotions. We begin to wonder: where is the the feel-good content that generates quality interactions and creates positive emotions for the consumer? It appears as if social media has been taken over by negativity and it is difficult for a social media user to discover and consume positive content.
We have gone over the stakeholders associated with producing/managing content on social media in an earlier post.
It is important to understand that negativity is not the same to every stakeholder. For some, sarcasm could be offensive, while for others it is funny. For some, war related news are a source of information, while for others they might cause distress. Hence the perceived amount of negativity and its effects are based on one’s outlook and preferences.
So what can we do about negativity on social media?
To enable the consumers to take control of the content they view and interact with, and the emotions and reactions generated by the social media in their life, we should give them the power over the amount of negativity v/s positivity that they consume every day.
We can do this creating a service that would work with social media accounts, in browsers or in apps, to curate and display the content according to the users’ wishes. The service would act as a middleware between the content and the user. When the user is browsing social media websites, then the content would first go through our service for it to be analyzed and modified according to the user’s preferences before being displayed to the user. Let us call this service - “The Echo Service”.
The most important features of the service would be as follows:
Filtering - Based on the preferences, the service can hide or suppress negative content. The filtering can be based on, for example, user generated keywords, or machine learning algorithms.
Re-sorting and highlighting - The content on a page can be re-sorted or highlighted on the page so the user can view the positive content more easily than the negative content.
Tracking - The service shall be able to be configured to track user behaviour and actions and then make suggestions based on that. For example, if the user is being shown too much negative content, the service should be able to detect that and suggest similar but positive content.
Settings - The most important aspect of any service is its flexibility to adapt to user preferences. The user should be able to configure the service properly. These configuration settings could include settings for - the level of filtering, adding keywords, re-sorting and highlighting, the level of information access available to the service, etc.
With the rise in the efficiency of machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms nowadays, it is imperative to make use of it. The service should be able to tell the difference between what classifies as a negative content and what should be considered positive content. For that matter, there should also be a provision for crowdsourced training of the service in order to allow the user of the service to flag negative content. Based on intelligent algorithms and user flagging, the service could be much more efficient in detecting negative content.
It is important to note that a service that has access to content that the user views will have lots of privacy and security concerns. Therefore it is very important not to break the trust of the user. Hence, the service would allow a transparent configuration of what content it can access and what it cannot. For example, the user must have the provision to block the service’s access to his banking websites.
What are the benefits?
As a result, users will be exposed to less negative content and have easier access to positive content. In turn, this will create less stress and healthier content consumers. In addition, the solution would work with the existing social media accounts, would be easy to integrate and use. Most importantly, the service could help deliver content based on one’s clearly defined preferences.
Any alternatives?
There are also several alternative ways of promoting positive content. One example is an entirely new social media network focusing on positive content. One such instance is the You-app (https://you-app.com/). By encouraging users to perform micro-actions in categories such as Mind, Food, Move and Love, You-app helps everyone develop their own incentive to do and think positively. However, not everybody uses this kind of specific social network and having a social network dedicated to positivity does not reduce negativity on the most popular ones.
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