Should we remove political allegiances from our profiles to make Twitter more compassionate?

There's an interesting article in the New Scientist (30th May 2015 issue) about social media and how compassionate we are through technology.

Image from Hashtags.org

Although the article mainly focuses on Facebook and its efforts to provide users with ways to resolve disputes, such as how to politely flag to a friend that a photo of you they posted is embarrassing and that is why you want it to be removed, it also looks at other social media interactions.

Of interest is the data provided by Disqus on the effect of upvoting or downvoting a post. Disqus provide the "discussion platform" for users of Wordpress, Tumblr and various other websites (such as the Herald's). To increase positive communication amongst the online community, Disqus required users to log in to vote, and began displaying the user names and profile pictures of those who voted on each comment.

Although reports of abuse fell by almost 80 per cent, it also produced negative feedback.

"We saw retaliation and vindictive trolling, people ganging up on each," says Daniel Ha, CEO of Disqus. "People would obsess over who had voted them down."

Research by Stanford University on Disqus's data showed that

positive feedback had no effect on what people posted, but downvotes made users more likely to post antisocial content. Downvotes changed behaviour in a way that poisoned an online community.

Disqus decided the best thing to do was to hide the downvote statistics.

I'm interested in how this applies to Twitter users and politics. In an election, voting for a political party is like giving them an upvote and all other parties a downvote. If you see a user on Twitter who also supports your political party, you are likely to follow them or react positively to their posts. This is the equivalent of an upvote.

But if you see someone from a political party you didn't vote for, you're perhaps less likely to follow them or only follow them in order to Tweet a reply that is effectively the equivalent of a downvote.

Does this lead to an increase in antisocial behaviour on Twitter? Are we effectively able to see everyone who has downvoted our Tweets because we can see they didn't vote the way we voted?

Do you rush to Twitter in order to target opponents?

Do you engage in "retaliation and vindictive trolling"?

Or is that all part of the fun of Twitter? If we all enjoy a healthy debate, then surely Twitter is the place to go to engage with others. Finding your opponents and then debating with them can provide all involved a great deal of pleasure.

But it can easily descend into petty name-calling and blocking of users. If you see you're losing the argument, do you begin throwing out personal abuse and trying to attack the opponent in some other way?

I think we all have to be careful online. Debate is only healthy when we stick to the topic. Stalking someone online in order to post "ur talking p*sh & ur party's deid so why don't u f*** off?" is abuse - it's not debate and it's not fun for anyone.

Should we remove our political allegiances from our profiles to make Twitter more compassionate?

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