Gina M. Masullo’s research while affiliated with University of Texas at Austin and other places

... Therefore the decrease in removal rate after treatment may be attributable to the concurrent increase in score and not an indication of norm acquisition. However, other research on Reddit failed to confirm this trend of less harsh moderation decisions pertaining to higher-scored posts [90]. ...

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Does Positive Reinforcement Work?: A Quasi-Experimental Study of the Effects of Positive Feedback on Reddit

... As the saliency of such policy issues grows, certain predispositions may be developed toward groups based on personal views. The perceptions that mainstream coverage elicits are then likely to be complemented by such existing attitudes toward movements and groups (Brown & Mourão, 2022;Hsiao & Radnitz, 2020;Masullo, Brown, & Harlow, 2023;McLeod & Detenber, 1999;Wouters, 2019). ...

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Testing the Attenuation of Protest Paradigm News Coverage Effects in the Presence of Prior Favorable Attitudes Toward a Cause

... Encouraging deliberation can increase intentions to wear a face mask during a pandemic (Capraro and Barcelo, 2021). Inducing empathy can favor social distancing and mask wearing (Pfattheicher et al., 2020) as well as positive attitudes toward political outgroups (Masullo, 2023). Social motivations such as reputation increase the accuracy of the assessment of online information (Ronzani et al., 2024;Rathje et al., 2023). ...

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Promoting civil discourse on social media using nudges: A tournament of seven interventions

... Apart from a relative lack of solid evidence, content moderation research can also be considered, at best, conceptually heterogeneous and, at worst, scattered and noisy with various distinct phenomena typically being subsumed under broad and sometimes inconsistently introduced terminologies. Given that well-functioning digital public spaces are pivotal for modern democracies (Masullo et al., 2022), it is essential for researchers to closely monitor findings concerning bystander experience of platform-led CM. This can help guide platform operators toward optimizing their moderation approaches -not necessarily to boost profits but to better navigate platforms' growing societal impact. ...

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Platform-led content moderation through the bystander lens: a systematic scoping review

... This becomes increasingly important as more and more people consume their news online (Newman et al., 2023) and as such shape their impression of societal polarization based on these discussions (Zerback & Fawzi, 2017). Perceiving polarization could lead readers to avoid participating in these online discussions themselves and thereby undermine the Internet's potential of enabling polyphonic dialogue (Lu et al., 2023), which is considered pivotal for the functioning of deliberative democracies (Habermas, 1984). ...

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Mitigating Perceived Polarization by Acknowledging Subjectivity: An Experimental Study of the Impact of Differently Phrasing Comments in Online News Discussions

... Uncivil discussion can also heighten negative emotions and closed-mindedness [11]. It has also been shown that people actively avoid engaging with comment threads starting with uncivil content, indicating a defensive response to toxic online environments [93]. Even those merely observing toxicity, as in the case of Maintainers on Github, experience substantial emotional taxing effort [94]. ...

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The medium is the message: toxicity declines in structured vs unstructured online deliberations

... Scholars have advanced connective democracy as a new way of thinking through these issues that builds on the ideal of deliberative democracy while also creating the "boundary conditions" for it to exist (Overgaard et al., 2022, p. 864). Connective democracy represents a theoretical framework for reducing stereotypes and misperceptions of outgroup members by promoting an understanding of how connections between individuals within a democracy, particularly between adversaries, are necessary for democracy to flourish (Overgaard et al., , 2022. Beyond just hearing the opinions of others, connective democracy emphasizes the necessity of bridges between opposing groups built on the understanding that democracy ultimately binds us together. ...

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Corrective Democracy? The Relationship Between Correction of Misinformation on Social Media and Connective Democratic Norms

... E. Lee, 2015). As a result, the political ideologies of specific individuals or groups may be relegated to the fringes or even suppressed out of fear of social exclusion-an effect known as the spiral of silence (Masullo & Duchovnay, 2022;Noelle-Neumann, 1974). ...

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The Politics of Ethics: Can Honesty Cross Over Political Polarization?

... The third and final phase in the research of the news gap is especially notable from 2020, where the study of thematic divergences between media and audiences continues and is extended to a myriad of casuistry, including: multiple social media, selection in other media such as mobile applications (Castro-Pérez, Diez-Gracia & Sánchez-García, 2022), variability in electoral periods (García-Bruno, 2020;De León et al., 2021;De León & Vermeer, 2022), political intensity (Mitchelstein et al., 2016) or crisis (Masullo, Jennings & Stroud, 2021); divergence in other variables of form and content, such as the feelings present in the information or the journalistic genres with which they are published (Ormen, 2019); the attributes or characteristics that describe the topics highlighted by journalists and audiences (Arceo-Vacas & Álvarez-Sánchez, 2020); and the frames or set of attributes with which the information is presented (Zunino et al., 2022). Experimentally, Chan et al. (2022) studied the possible neurological reactions that their exposure to the most read and shared news causes in individuals. ...

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When digital audiences disregard the journalistic agenda: conceptualization and evolution of the news gap

... During times of crisis, social media engagement can provide insight into public sentiment towards and the level of trust in government authorities. Times of crisis, such as the health crisis, have generated a high volume of social media discussion globally [2,5,6]. However, at the same time, public opposition to official guidelines and health guidelines led to the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories [7], which resulted in vaccine hesitancy in various countries [8,9]. ...

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Share If You Believe, Comment If You Doubt: The Effect of Source of Information, Trust, and Belief in Conspiracy Theories on Engagement with Facebook Posts