In Bad Faith: Assessing Discussion Quality on Social Media

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the prevalence of bad faith interactions in social media replies to mainstream media and government posts, revealing a high incidence especially from verified accounts, and discusses implications for social media discourse quality.

Contribution

It introduces automated methods to assess conversation sincerity and quantifies the extent of bad faith interactions in social media replies to official sources.

Findings

68.3% of replies are bad faith interactions

91.7% of replies from verified accounts are bad faith

Implications for social media discourse quality and user experience

Abstract

The quality of a user's social media experience is determined both by the content they see and by the quality of the conversation and interaction around it. In this paper, we look at replies to tweets from mainstream media outlets and official government agencies and assess if they are good faith, engaging honestly and constructively with the original post, or bad faith, attacking the author or derailing the conversation. We assess automated approaches that may help in making this determination and then show that within our dataset of replies to mainstream media outlets and government agencies, bad faith interactions constitute 68.3% of all replies we studied, suggesting potential concerns about the quality of discourse in these specific conversational contexts. This is particularly true from verified accounts, where 91.7% of replies were bad faith. Given that verified accounts are algorithmically amplified, we discuss the implications of our work for understanding the user experience on social media.