'Walking Into a Fire Hoping You Don't Catch': Strategies and Designs to Facilitate Cross-Partisan Online Discussions

TL;DR

This study explores how US Reddit users engage in cross-partisan discussions, revealing their expectations, strategies, and openness to certain design features that could facilitate better understanding and reduce hostility.

Contribution

It provides qualitative insights into user strategies and perceptions regarding online cross-partisan conversations, highlighting design considerations for fostering constructive engagement.

Findings

Users have diverse, sometimes conflicting expectations for discussions.

Some users prefer minimal information about outpartisans to avoid bias.

Users are open to sharing certain non-political information to facilitate engagement.

Abstract

While cross-partisan conversations are central to a vibrant democracy, these are hard conversations to have, especially in the United States amidst unprecedented levels of partisan animosity. Such interactions often devolve into name-calling and personal attacks. We report on a qualitative study of 17 US residents who have engaged with outpartisans on Reddit, to understand their expectations and the strategies they adopt in such interactions. We find that users have multiple, sometimes contradictory expectations of these conversations, ranging from deliberative discussions to entertainment and banter, which adds to the challenge of finding conversations they like. Through experience, users have refined multiple strategies to foster good cross-partisan engagement. Contrary to offline settings where knowing about the interlocutor can help manage disagreements, on Reddit, some users look to actively learn as little as possible about their outpartisan interlocutors for fear that such information may bias their interactions. Through design probes about hypothetical features intended to reduce partisan hostility, we find that users are actually open to knowing certain kinds of information about their interlocutors, such as non-political subreddits that they both participate in, and to having that information made visible to their interlocutors. However, making other information visible, such as the other subreddits that they participate in or previous comments they posted, though potentially humanizing, raises concerns around privacy and misuse of that information for personal attacks.