Staff wellbeing programmes help social relationships and reduce bullying

by University of East Anglia

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Programmes aimed at supporting employees' health and wellbeing can also benefit their social relationships and reduce bullying, according to a new study published today.

Researchers from the University of East Anglia (UEA), working in collaboration with insurance and investments company Vitality, found that the more employees engage with health and wellbeing programmes (HWPs) the better the quality of co-worker relationships, the less they experience bullying over time, and the better their longer-term wellbeing and job satisfaction.

Unexpectedly, the results suggest that even when senior managers are not committed to these initiatives, employee engagement with HWPs is associated with better relationships at work and the same subsequent positive benefits.

The researchers say the findings are particularly relevant given the new patterns of working which have emerged as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Organisations are increasingly adopting HWPs, yet further understanding is required of the underlying processes or conditions that may influence their effectiveness on employee outcomes, such as wellbeing and job satisfaction.

Programmes vary in scope and comprehensiveness but can include a broad range of information, health screening and activities which attempt to reduce health risks, prevent chronic disease, support healthy behaviours or attempt to identify and change potential health-related problems.

This three-year study used data from 7,785 UK employees at 64 organisations. Its findings are published in the British Journal of Management.

Lead authors Dr. Roberta Fida and Dr. Annilee Game, from UEA's Norwich Business School, said the evidence showed that promoting wellbeing interventions in the organisations has "unintended" positive consequences.

"While organisations may adopt these programmes primarily to target employee health and wellbeing directly, we found that employees' social relationships also benefit," said Dr. Fida.

"When organisations invest in wellbeing they communicate care for their employees and this is reciprocated with more respectful interpersonal interactions. This in turn significantly reduces the onset of workplace bullying and improves longer term mental and physical health as well as job satisfaction."

Dr. Game said: "These findings are especially relevant for managers to consider as organisations develop new patterns of working in the post-COVID era. People's wellbeing has been significantly affected by the pandemic. Investing in HWPs brings both relationship and health benefits that can help support employees adjusting to the new normal."

The research used 2015-2017 data from 'Vitality's Britain's Healthiest Workplace', an annual study that provides one of the largest and most comprehensive datasets on organisational performance and wellbeing of UK organisations and their employees. The study looks at personal, social, lifestyle, job and workplace information from the employee and organisational perspective using self-report questionnaires. Any UK-based organisation employing at least 20 people, in any sector, can participate.

Dr. Martin Stepanek, Lead Researcher at Vitality and co-author of the new study said: "This study confirms just how wide-reaching the benefits of implementing employee health and wellbeing programmes can be. There are numerous positive consequences of wellbeing interventions—beyond the obvious intended benefits—for the organisation and its employees, and wider society.

"By offering such programmes, organisations not only directly affect employees' wellbeing, they help to create a culture of positive change in which employees are more likely to thrive."

'Longitudinal Effects of Engagement with Workplace Health Programmes on Employee Outcomes: A Relational Perspective' is published in the British Journal of Management on Friday November 19.Stress management classes and wellbeing coaching no help at improving workers' mental health, study says

More information: Longitudinal Effects of Engagement with Workplace Health Programmes on Employee Outcomes: A Relational Perspective, British Journal of Management, DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12565

Provided by University of East Anglia 

What Americans hear about social justice at church, and what they do about it

by R. Khari Brown, Ronald Brown, The Conversation

Credit: Chart: R. Khari Brown, Ronald E. Brown, and James S. Jackson 

Source: "Race and the Power of Sermons on American Politics

On June 5, 2020, it had been just over a week since a white Minnesota police officer, Derek Chauvin, killed George Floyd, an unarmed, African American man. Protests were underway outside Central United Methodist Church, an interracial church in downtown Detroit with a long history of activism on civil rights, peace, immigrant rights and poverty issues.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the church was no longer holding in-person worship services. But anyone walking into its sanctuary that day would have seen long red flags behind the pastor's lectern, displaying the words "peace" and "love." A banner reading "Michigan Says No! To War" hung alongside pictures of civil rights icons Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., as well as labor-rights activist Cesar Chavez. In line with her church's activist tradition, senior pastor Jill Hardt Zundell stood outside the building and preached about her church's commitment to eradicating anti-Black racism to her congregants and all that passed by.

In our sociology and political science research, we have both studied how race, religion and politics are intimately connected in the United States. Our recent book, "Race and the Power of Sermons on American Politics"—written with psychologist James S. Jackson—uses 44 national and regional surveys conducted between 1941 and 2019 to examine racial differences in who hears messages about social justice at church. We also examined how hearing those types of sermons correlates with support for policies aimed at reducing social inequality and with political activism.

For centuries, many Americans have envisioned that their country has a special relationship with God—that their nation is "a city on a hill" with special blessings and responsibilities. Beliefs that America is exceptional have inspired views across the political spectrum.

Many congregations that emphasize social justice embrace this idea of a "covenant" between the United States and the creator. They interpret it to mean Americans must create opportunity and inclusion for all—based in the belief that all people are equally valued by God.

Politics in the pews

In our book, we find that, depending upon the issue, between half and two-thirds of Americans support religious leaders taking public positions on racism, poverty, war and immigration. Roughly a third report attending worship settings where their clergy or friends discuss these issues and the importance of politically acting on one's beliefs.

African Americans and Hispanic Americans tend to be more supportive of religious leaders speaking out against racism and attempting to influence poverty and immigration policy. On the whole, African Americans are the most likely to support religious leaders expressing political views on specific issues, from poverty and homelessness to peace, as we examine in our book.

Black Americans are also more likely to attend worship settings where clergy and other members encourage them to connect their faith to social justice work. For example, according to a July 2020 Pew Research Center poll, 67% of African American worshippers reported hearing sermons in support of Black Lives Matter, relative to 47% of Hispanics and 36% of whites.

Race also affects the relationship between hearing such sermons and supporting related policies. When statistically accounting for religious affiliation, political party and demographic characteristics, attending these types of congregations more strongly associates with white Americans supporting progressive policy positions than it does for Black Americans and Hispanics.

White worshippers who hear sermons about race and poverty, for example, are more likely to oppose spending cuts to welfare programs than those who hear no such messages at their place of worship.

This is not the case for African Americans and Hispanics, however, who are as likely to oppose social welfare spending cuts regardless of where they worship. In other words, while hearing sermons about social justice issues informs or at least aligns with white progressive policy attitudes, this alignment is not as strong for Blacks and Hispanics.

Clergy of predominantly white worship spaces are often more politically liberal than their congregants. Historically, this has translated into members pushing back when clergy take public positions that are more progressive than their congregation's.

This may explain why white parishioners who chose to attend congregations where they hear social justice-themed sermons tend to be more politically progressive, or more open to sermons challenging previous views, than are other white parishioners.

From words to action

However, when it comes to the connection between hearing sermons and taking political action, race doesn't matter as much. That is, when taking into account religious affiliation, party affiliation and social demographics, people who hear social justice-themed sermons in their places of worship are more likely than other Americans to engage in political activism, regardless of their race.

For example, during the months following Floyd's murder, Black, white and Hispanic congregants who heard sermons about race and policing were more likely than others to have protested for any purpose in the past 12 months, according to data from the 2020 National Politics Study. More specifically, white Americans who attended houses of worship where they heard those types of sermons were more than twice as likely to participate in a protest as other white worshippers. Black and Hispanic attendees were almost twice as likely to protest, compared to those attending houses of worship where they did not hear sermons about race and policing.

The difference between people who attend houses of worship with a social-justice focus and people who did not attend religious services at all is even more striking. White Americans who heard such messages at religious services were almost four times more likely to protest than white Americans who did not attend services; Black and Hispanic Americans were almost three times as likely.

Today, many Americans are pessimistic about inequality, political divisions and ethnic conflict. Yet, as these surveys show, social justice-minded congregations inspire members to work for policies that support their vision of the public good.Huge congregations view racial inequality differently than others do, study shows

Provided by The Conversation 

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Diagnosing current and future water risks facing the pharmaceutical sector

by WWF

Water stewardship is key to reducing water risks. Credit: WWF-Myanmar

The pharmaceutical sector exists to improve the wellbeing and health of billions of people globally. The production and use of its products also have the potential to negatively impact human and ecosystem health—if appropriate action to manage its potential impacts on water is not taken.

The sector is generally very aware of the dependencies it has on water and the potential it has for impacting water. A new report from WWF and AstraZeneca—Diagnosing current and future water risks facing the pharmaceutical sector—focuses on how the sector is currently addressing water across its value chains and what shared water challenges it faces in the places it operates.

The report begins with an overview of the pharmaceutical sector's impacts on water and the current water focus areas across its value chain. The report then draws on the insights from a basin water risk assessment, using WWF's Water Risk Filter, of 5,272 pharmaceutical manufacturing sites around the world involved in the manufacturing of human-related pharmaceuticals.

The basin risk assessment also considered future water-related basin risks by applying TCFD-aligned scenarios to the results. These insights help to illustrate how water quality risks represent a significant current and future water-related risk for the sector.

It also identifies 27 large basins that host more than 60% of all pharmaceutical sites assessed. These basins present an opportunity for the sector to act collectively on shared water challenges. The last part of the report draws together all the earlier insights to present a series of six recommendations for the pharmaceutical sector to consider adopting both as individual companies but also as a sector.

The purpose of this report is to analyze the sector's positioning of water within the current and future water contexts in which it operates and provide recommendations for a strategic sectoral repositioning on water to meet these future challenges.

The implementation of many of the recommendations within this report will represent logistical, operational, and potentially legal challenges for pharmaceutical companies. However, many of the future trends identified in this report are likely to impact how the sector operates in the future.

The report concludes that there is an opportunity for pharmaceutical companies to anticipate future impacts of both water quality and quantity. They could take a lead beyond regulation and work together to develop new approaches to protect these essential resources.Human rights to water of millions endangered by large-scale agriculture and industries

More information: Diagnosing current and future water risks facing the pharmaceutical sector: wwfint.awsassets.panda.org/dow … eutical_sector_1.pdf

Provided by WWF 

If we couch scientific misconduct as social misconduct the wider effects can be seen more clearly

by David Bradley, Inderscience

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

We all live and work in a scientific world, even those who perceive their realm to be within the arts and humanities. At no time is this more apparent than at the height of a global pandemic. The impact of science on our lives and the environment are profound given that the technology wrought by our scientific understanding of the world around us can be used in a positive way or abused. As such, science is deeply embedded in our society.

Writing in the International Journal of Sustainable Development, Juliette Rouchier of the Université Paris-Dauphine, France, argues that the notion of scientific misconduct, once seemingly distant from our everyday lives, is in fact far more relevant and is, in reality, social misconduct. The consequences of such misconduct however it might be labeled are therefore critically important to society.

Rouchier points out that scientists might imagine they benefit from an "aura of neutrality and reason." In this sense, they can express their negative personal opinions in public as if those opinions are somehow relevant constructed knowledge. This can have serious consequences when an issue being discussed is as important as pollution, which has a significant political component that somehow lies outside the scientific realm. This is despite the fact that the technologies involved and their effects require a fundamental scientific understanding without which the technologies would not exist, our picture of the environment and the effects of pollution, and the new technologies to address the problem would not exist.

Fake news and misinformation emerging from the realm of science must be seen as a social problem and addressed as such. If falsehoods are being spread by individuals for political, economic, or other gain, then those disseminating such lies must be seen as being involved in scientific conduct of a most serious nature. The public needs to trust science, its processes and the knowledge it generates. Without that trust, the nuance of what is meant by a scientific theory is lost and those who take an anti-scientific stance on many topics is reinforced to the detriment of us all and to the detriment of the world in which we live.Combating COVID-19 misinformation: Brief infographic exposure may increase trust in science

More information: Juliette Rouchier, Scientific misconduct as social misconduct, International Journal of Sustainable Development (2021). DOI: 10.1504/IJSD.2021.118845

Provided by Inderscience 

Australian open-access research plan isn't risk-free

by Kathy Bowrey, Kimberlee Weatherall, Kylie Pappalardo, Marie Hadley, The Conversation

Paywalls have limited access even to research publications relating to open access.

 Credit: Dunk/Flickr, CC BY 4.0

Chief Scientist Cathy Foley is leading an open access strategy for Australia. Foley estimates the Australian government invests A$12 billion a year of public money in research and innovation only for most of the publications that eventuate to be locked behind a paywall, inaccessible to industry and the taxpayer. At the same time, Australian universities and others pay publishers an estimated $460 million to $1 billion a year to see this published work.

Inspired by the European open-access initiative Plan S, Foley's goal is to make all publicly funded Australian research publications free for the public to read. This is to be done through a sector-wide agreement between universities and publishers.

The multinational publishers of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) research—Elsevier, Springer Nature Group, Wiley and Clarivate—are talking with the Chief Scientist. But no new sector funding is available from the government. The idea is it will pool the funds that universities currently pay to publishers to finance new sector-wide transformative agreements. These are also known as "read and publish" agreements.

Australia has lagged behind Europe and America in making research open access. That's despite it being required by funders like the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and Australian Research Council (ARC).

Transformative agreements could help redress the problem. However, these agreements are also a new business model.

Two existing models: Green and gold

When publishers accept a journal article for publication they negotiate with authors about the license terms that will apply to its distribution. Most publishers will issue contracts that allow for open access. It's usually achieved in one of two ways.

The "green model" involves researchers placing copies of their work in an online open-access repository. Often the pre-editing and layout version is made available because the publisher denies permission to make the "version of record" accessible to non-subscribers, even in the university institutional repository. Sometimes authors can negotiate green access but with a delay of at least 12 months and up to several years.

The "gold model" guarantees the article will immediately be made available free to readers. It usually involves authors or their institutions paying an up-front article processing charge (APC) to publishers.

APCs can be steep. Costs map the "prestige" of the journal and what the market will bear. The huge diversity in fees, even from the same publisher, shows these are unrelated to any real-world cost of article processing.

Both green and gold open-access publishing can increase the social capital or reputation of the author. For the publisher, it increases the asset value of the much-cited text and the associated journal.

However, in the business of scholarly communication, individual articles are not of significant value. Commercial products emerge from the accumulation of individual copyrights. Publishers bundle works under recognizable titles to be sold back to the sector as database subscriptions and data-driven research services and platforms.

Data related to citations, reads and downloads can be sold to third parties. These include the ARC to underpin its ranking of universities and grants.

Large publishers monitor repositories and sharing sites that often house green open-access papers. They do this both to capture the data generated and to reduce the potential of these outlets to challenge the need for commercial library subscriptions.

For example, Elsevier's research products include Scopus, SciVal, Science Direct, Mendeley, Pure, Academia and bepress/SSRN. Elsevier has taken copyright infringement action against independent sharing sites such as Sci-Hub and ResearchGate.

What is the transformative agreement business model?

With transformative agreements, universities agree to pay a fee that covers both subscriptions and costs for their future open-access publishing. These agreements do not necessarily reduce subscription costs.

Some agreements create a "read fee" for subscription access to existing academic literature, with open-access publishing apparently permitted at no extra cost. Others limit how many articles will be published as open access by the institution or discount article processing costs. Many include an annual fee increase of 2-3% to cover inflation.

In Australia, the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) has taken the lead on negotiating transformative agreements on behalf of its member institutions. It is not yet clear who would negotiate agreements with publishers under the Chief Scientist's plan, if the funding is not directly paid by universities but by government.

In the UK, the introduction of Plan S has raised concerns for the future of humanities, arts and social sciences (HASS), which also face the higher costs of monograph publishing. Were Foley's negotiations to proceed with the big STEM publishers first, HASS, Australian and independent publishers could find themselves locked out of open access, as the pooled fund runs dry. A sustainable transition to open access requires arrangements with a variety of publishers.

Pooling funds and collective negotiation are helpful in achieving better open-access outcomes. However, greater financial transparency and accountability over who benefits from academic copyright are required for Plan S-style agreements.

There are risks in taking money from universities that are struggling to fund research. Their grants already do not cover the full cost of academic research. One outcome is pressure to increase teaching-only positions.

As global open-access advocacy organization SPARC reported in its 2021 update: "The past year has seen more [commercial] deals that led to more concentration, loss of diversity, and ultimately to the academic community's lessening control over its own destiny."

Academics provide a free service to commercial publishers by researching, writing, reviewing and editing journals without payment. Universities pay for this labor, which generates the intellectual property relied on by publishers. Recognizing this value could help us cut better deals with publishers.

Springer Nature announces plan for gold open access options for Nature journals

Provided by The Conversation 

Pandemic sees criminals target online shoppers: Europol

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

The coronavirus pandemic has sparked a sharp rise in online shopping fraud, Europe's policing agency warned on Thursday, saying criminals continued to prey on victims working from home.

Fears of catching the virus have driven a sharp increase in online shopping, which in turn has led to a major rise in delivery fraud in the second year of the pandemic, Europol said in its annual cybercrime report.

"The extension of lockdowns throughout Europe has brought with it a number of new e-commerce opportunities, which have often proven to be a target for criminals," the Hague-based agency said.

"Criminals offer goods and receive payment without delivery, defraud online shops with weak security measures, or use delivery services as phishing lures," it said.

Mobile phones in particular were being targeted, with criminal gangs posing as delivery services pretending to offer information about a parcel, but in reality hoping to get the victim's account and credit card details.

This included sending messages via SMS on mobile phones, a practice referred to as "smishing."

Meanwhile, the dark web continued to be the main market place for illicit activity, despite recent global police successes in taking down illegal websites such as DarkMarket in January.

Europol said cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Monero remained the most popular form of payment for illegal goods and services on the dark web.

Weapons appear to be increasingly traded on the dark web as well as through encrypted chat groups, Europol said.

Novel weapons, such as those made by three-dimensional printers, were also on the rise.

For instance, Spanish police in September last year busted a workshop where these weapons were being made.

There, law officials seized templates for guns downloaded from the dark web and several 3D printers, "one of which was in the process of printing a small firearm," Europol said.

Police in Europe bust gang hijacking celeb phones, arrest 10

© 2021 AFP

 Is watching believing? In spreading politics, videos may not be much more persuasive than their text-based counterparts

by Peter Dizikes, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

It might seem that video would be a singularly influential medium for spreading information online. But a new experiment conducted by MIT researchers finds that video clips have only a modestly larger impact on political persuasion than the written word does.

"Our conclusion is that watching video is not much more persuasive than reading text," says David Rand, an MIT professor and co-author of a new paper detailing the study's results.

The study comes amid widespread concern about online political misinformation, including the possibility that technology-enabled "deepfake" videos could easily convince many people watching them to believe false claims.

"Technological advances have created new opportunities for people to falsify video footage, but we still know surprisingly little about how individuals process political video versus text," says MIT researcher Chloe Wittenberg, the lead author on the paper. "Before we can identify strategies for combating the spread of deepfakes, we first need to answer these more basic questions about the role of video in political persuasion."

The paper, "The (Minimal) Persuasive Advantage of Political Video over Text," is published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The co-authors are Adam J. Berinsky, the Mitsui Professor of Political Science; Rand, the Erwin H. Schell Professor and Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences; Ben Tappin, a postdoc in the Human Cooperation Lab; and Chloe Wittenberg, a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science.

Believability and persuasion

The study operates on a distinction between the credibility of videos and their persuasiveness. That is, an audience might find a video believable, but their attitudes might not change in response. Alternately, a video might not seem credible to a large portion of the audience but still alter viewers' attitudes or behavior.

For example, Rand says, "When you watch a stain remover ad, they all have this same format, where some stain gets on a shirt, you pour the remover on it, and it goes in the washer and hey, look, the stain is gone. So, one question is: Do you believe that happened, or was it just trickery? And the second question is: How much do you want to buy the stain remover? The answers to those questions don't have to be tightly related."

To conduct the study, the MIT researchers performed a pair of survey experiments involving 7,609 Americans, using the Lucid and Dynata platforms. The first study involved 48 ads obtained through the Peoria Project, an archive of political materials. Survey participants either watched an ad, read a transcript of the ad, or received no information at all. (Each participant did this multiple times.) For each ad, participants were asked whether the message seemed believable and whether they agreed with its main message. They were then shown a series of questions measuring whether they found the subject personally important and whether they wanted more information.

The second study followed the same format but involved 24 popular video clips about COVID-19, taken from YouTube.

Overall, the results showed that video performed somewhat better than written text on the believability front but had a smaller relative advantage when it came to persuasion. Participants were modestly more likely to believe that events actually occurred when they were shown in a video as opposed to being described in a written transcript. However, the advantage of video over text was only one-third as big when it came to changing participants' attitudes and behavior.

As a further indication of this limited persuasive advantage of video versus text, the difference between the "control condition" (with participants who received no information) and reading text was as great as that between reading the transcript and watching the video.

These differences were surprisingly stable across groups. For instance, in the second study, there were only small differences in the effects seen for political versus nonpolitical messages about COVID-19, suggesting the findings hold across varying types of content. The researchers also did not find significant differences among the respondents based on factors such as age, political partisanship, and political knowledge.

"Seeing may be believing," Berinsky says, "but our study shows that just because video is more believable doesn't mean that it can change people's minds."

Questions about online behavior

The scholars acknowledge that the study did not exactly replicate the conditions in which people consume information online, but they suggest that the main findings yield valuable insight about the relative power of video versus text.

"It's possible that in real life things are a bit different," Rand says. "It's possible that as you're scrolling through your newsfeed, video captures your attention more than text would. You might be more likely to look at it. This doesn't mean that video is inherently more persuasive than text—just that it has the potential to reach a wider audience."

That said, the MIT team notes there are some clear directions for future research in this field—including the question of whether or not people are more willing to watch videos than to read materials.

"Some people may prefer watching video to reading text," notes Tappin. "For example, platforms like TikTok are heavily video-based, and the audience is mostly young adults. Among such audiences, a small persuasive advantage of video over text may rapidly scale up because video can reach so many more people. Future research could explore these and other ideas."People are persuaded by social media messages, not view numbers

More information: Chloe Wittenberg et al, The (minimal) persuasive advantage of political video over text, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2114388118

Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 

Provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

De-platforming Facebook COVID conspiracy theorists has not significantly reduced their influence, says research

by Cardiff University

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Removing high-profile COVID conspiracy theorists from Facebook has had only limited impact upon the spread of misleading information, research from Cardiff University has found.

Fan pages, affiliated groups and other secondary accounts set up by devoted believers continue to share problematic content about the causes and consequences of COVID-19 long after primary accounts have been taken down, the findings reveal.

The team, from Cardiff University's Crime and Security Research Institute (CSRI), say these "minion accounts" also increase the resilience of conspiracists by encouraging them to diversify their presence across an alternative network of platforms, personal websites and subscription services.

Published in the peer-reviewed journal Information, Communication and Society, the study examines Facebook's de-platforming of David Icke and Kate Shemirani for repeatedly violating its policies on harmful disinformation during the pandemic, and how followers of these individuals responded to the interventions to limit their overall effectiveness.

Lead author Dr. Helen Innes, Research Fellow at the CSRI, said, "Our research shows how de-platforming can sometimes reinforce support for charismatic conspiracists like Icke and Shemirani amongst their adherents. Their removal from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube is framed as a badge of honor, evidence that their actions worried mainstream big tech enough to act against them.

"When this happens, our data shows how their followers mobilize by setting up new fan pages, public and private groups, sharing links and videos, and setting social media challenges in order to continue a mission which they feel is being censored.

"In this context, de-platforming has limited success in actually disrupting and suppressing the harmful behavior. Instead, for many it actually reinforces their conspiratorial beliefs, as what we term 'minion accounts' double down on spreading the disinforming material on behalf of those who have been de-platformed."

In the four weeks following the de-platforming of Icke, a well-established conspiracy theorist, researchers analyzed 11,877 public posts that mentioned him. These posts yielded 2.2 million user interactions. In the seven days following his account removal on 30 April, his public mentions on Facebook increased by 84%.

The team analyzed 1,636 post mentions of Kate Shemirani during 2020. Her profile grew in prominence during the pandemic before she was de-platformed on 4 September 2020.

In the two months following her removal, post mentions and user engagement on Facebook decreased markedly. However, the suppression effect appeared to be temporary, with signs of revival from the end of 2020, where the number of Facebook video shares increased from approximately ten in October and November 2020 to over 60 in the next two months.

Facebook's measures to stop misleading information were ramped up in 2020 in response to the pandemic and prior to the US election. De-platforming, which is Facebook's ultimate sanction, was applied to accounts assessed as posing risks to public safety, defined under its Dangerous Individuals and Organizations Policy.

In the year to September 2020, Facebook took down more than 1 million groups for repeat violations, implementing new counter-measures intended to prevent the administrators of those groups from creating new ones.

Co-author Professor Martin Innes, Director of the CSRI, said, "There is little doubt that despite Facebook's efforts to combat the spread of harmful misinformation, more effective action is required from big tech in order to combat the deluge of conspiracy theories that we've seen over the course of the pandemic.

"If, as our study suggests, de-platforming can have complex effects in terms of both constraining the public reach of harmful content, whilst simultaneously inducing greater resilience among these groups, then further measures will need to be introduced to ensure misleading information is not allowed to thrive online."Facebook bans German accounts under new 'social harm' policy

More information: H. Innes et al, De-platforming disinformation: conspiracy theories and their control, Information, Communication & Society (2021). DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2021.1994631

Provided by Cardiff University 

Online anonymity: 'Stable pseudonyms' create a more civil environment than real user names 

by Alfred Moore, The Conversation

Credit: Shutterstock

The ability to remain anonymous when commenting online is a double-edged sword. It is valuable because it enables people to speak without fear of social and legal discrimination. But this is also what makes it dangerous. Someone from a repressive religious community can use anonymity to talk about their sexuality, for example. But someone else can use anonymity to hurl abuse at them with impunity.

Many people focus on the dangers of online anonymity. Back in 2011, Randi Zuckerberg, sister of Mark and (then) marketing director of Facebook, said that for safety's sake, "anonymity on the internet has to go away". Such calls appear again and again. Behind them is a common intuition: that debate would be more civil and constructive if people used their real names.

But my research with colleagues suggests that anonymity—under certain conditions—can actually make for more civil and productive online discussion. This surprising result came out of a study looking at the deliberative quality of comments on online news articles under a range of different identity rules.

We built a data set of 45 million comments on news articles on the Huffington Post website between January 2013 and February 2015. During this period, the site moved from a regime of easy anonymity to registered pseudonyms and finally to outsourcing their comments to Facebook. This created three distinct phases.

In the initial phase users could easily set up multiple accounts. The comment space was, at that time, a troll's paradise. People could read an article, quickly create a username, and post whatever they wanted. If moderators blocked that username for abusive behavior, the person (or even bot) behind it could just make another, and then another, and so on. This led to a space that was unpleasant for users. So the website began to make changes.

In the second phase, users had to authenticate their accounts, but did not have to use their real name with their comments. That meant they could be anonymous to other users but could be identified by the platform. If they behaved badly and were blocked, they couldn't just make a new account and carry on—at least, not without creating a new authenticating account on Facebook. This made personas on this commenting space less disposable. They became "stable pseudonyms."

In the third phase, the commenting system was outsourced to Facebook. Huffington Post usernames were replaced with user's Facebook names and avatars. Depending on settings, comments might appear on users' Facebook feeds. While not everyone has their own face on their profile picture, and not everyone even uses their real name on their account, many users do. This third phase therefore roughly approximates a real-name environment.

Keeping it friendly

We looked initially at the use of swear words and offensive terms—a crude measure of civility. We found that after the first change the use of these words dropped significantly. This was not just because some of the worst offenders left the site. Among those who stayed, language was cleaner after the change than before. We describe this as a sort of "broken-windows" effect, after the famous theory that cleaning up a neighborhood can help reduce crime. Here, a cleaner environment improves everyone's behavior.

We then looked across all three phases at other features of individual comments, including the length of words, causation words (for example, "because"), words indicating tentative conclusions (for example, "perhaps"), and more. We were able to automate this analysis and use it to construct a measure of the "cognitive complexity" of comments. This method has been tested on the deliberations of the Swiss parliament and shown to be a good proxy for deliberative quality. We could not, of course, see the context and meaning of each individual comment, but using this method at least allowed us to do the analysis at a very large scale.

Our results suggest that the quality of comments was highest in the middle phase. There was a great improvement after the shift from easy or disposable anonymity to what we call "durable pseudonyms." But instead of improving further after the shift to the real-name phase, the quality of comments actually got worse—not as bad as in the first phase, but still worse by our measure.

A surprise finding

This complicates the common assumption that people behave better with their real names on display. We don't know exactly what explains our results, but one possibility is that under durable pseudonyms the users orient their comments primarily at their fellow commentators as an audience. They then perhaps develop a concern for their own reputation within that forum, as has been suggested elsewhere. It's possible that a real-name environment shifts the dynamic. When you make comments that can be seen not only by other Huffington Post readers but also by your Facebook friends, it seems plausible that you might speak differently.

What matters, it seems, is not so much whether you are commenting anonymously, but whether you are invested in your persona and accountable for its behavior in that particular forum. There seems to be value in enabling people to speak on forums without their comments being connected, via their real names, to other contexts. The online comment management company Disqus, in a similar vein, found that comments made under conditions of durable pseudonymity were rated by other users as having the highest quality.

There is obviously more to online discussion spaces than just their identity rules. But we can at least say that calls to end anonymity online by forcing people to reveal their real identities might not have the effects people expect—even if it appears to be the most obvious answer.Banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer to online abuse

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