In the summer of 2015, Greg, Rasheed, and a few of their peers started fighting back against racism on Twitter. They found people who used the n-word and gently admonished them, reminding them that they were harassing and hurting real people.
Which is ironic, since neither Greg nor Rasheed were real people themselves. They were bots.
They were the creations of Kevin Munger, a politics student at New York University. By programming a variety of Twitter bots to respond to racist abuse against black users, he showed that a simple one-tweet rebuke can actually reduce online racism. “I like to read this as optimistic,” he says. “It is possible to change people’s behavior and not just for a short amount of time.”
But there’s a catch: The rebukes only worked if they came from white people (or bots with white profile pictures) with lots of followers.
“There’s a reason why higher-status members of these communities bear a larger share of the responsibility for speaking out against racist or bigoted speech,” says Betsy Levy Paluck, a psychologist at Princeton University. “This isn’t just a moral judgment but an empirical regularity that’s been coming out of many research programs: People with higher status are influencing norms, and with that influence comes responsibility. If anyone says, I’m not a role model, that’s a wish, not a fact.”
[For more of this story, written by Ed Yong, go to https://www.theatlantic.com/te...g-harassment/507722/]
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