Early advocates of social media believed that the creation of these platforms would lead to positive outcomes. When Facebook was launched in 2004, it was praised for its ability to “connect the entire world.” In hindsight, many of these ideals were optimistic at their time as social media platforms are often criticized for spreading hate and misinformation.
This focus on negativity tends to overshadow the positive, prosocial behaviors facilitated on social media, including organ donation campaigns and “buy nothing” groups. However, the same social media features that encourage prosocial behaviors can also be exploited by bad actors.
These dynamics are explored in a new paper by Annenberg PhD student and Computational Social Science Lab (CSSLab) member Timothy Dorr, Duncan Watts (University of Pennsylvania) and coauthors Trisha Nagpal (University of Pennsylvania), and Chris Bail (Duke), which examines the tension between positive and negative outcomes on social media platforms, with particular attention to what enables prosocial behavior and how it might be sustained.
One of the more impressive examples of prosocial behavior highlighted in the paper is Wikipedia, which the authors discuss as a notable early demonstration of collaborative effort online. Thanks to these efforts, Wikipedia is now one of the most widely-known sites on the internet, and its high level of accuracy is a testament to the power of collaboration in making knowledge more widely accessible to all.
While Wikipedia stands as a remarkable example of collaborative knowledge creation, Dorr and coauthors identify several additional categories of prosocial behavior that emerge on social media platforms:
First is connecting new communities, as social media has allowed people to connect with others they would never meet in-person. For example, people with rare conditions have the opportunity to find others with the same condition. Social media can enable these connections through features like anonymity, which has empowered those to start social movements in places where free speech is suppressed, and asynchrony, which allows people to reflect and learn from one another’s experiences over time. The authors note that these same features can unfortunately embolden bad actors as they do not have to fear repercussions.
Beyond connecting communities, the authors also discuss how social media can enable collective problem solving during crises and emergencies, and expands philanthropy through facilitating crowdfunding and peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns.
To better understand what facilitates prosocial behavior on social media, the authors outline a comprehensive research agenda focusing on four key areas. Firstly, they suggest investigating how network structures affect behavior, examining effects of connectivity patterns, geographical distribution, and identity management across different social contexts. Secondly, they emphasize studying platform affordances, exploring questions such as whether features should be implemented in a top-down manner by companies, or emerge organically from users, how content moderation should be structured, and how content curation algorithms influence behavior. Thirdly, they highlight the importance of understanding how to create and maintain prosocial norms, examining whether clear community rules and purposive boundaries enhance prosocial behavior, and investigating how status indicators and rewards could incentivize positive contributions.
Finally, they call for research on sustainable business models that can align commercial interests with prosocial outcomes, exploring how platforms might balance profit motives with public interest, investigating alternative funding approaches like decentralized platforms or public/private partnerships, and examining how regulation or shareholder activism might create incentives for prosocial design. The authors emphasize that identifying the causal factors behind prosocial behavior requires rigorous empirical analysis across all these interconnected domains and will likely require collaboration between academics and industry.
As social media is already flooded with negative content, there is a lot of research potential in how to make social media better for users and how to create more positive outcomes. Dorr and colleagues compare prosocial behavior to tiny flowers that grow in between the cracks of a parking lot. Instead of “simply searching for flowers,” or the positives on social media, the focus should be on how social media platforms can be optimized to become a “fertile garden for flowers to grow.”
Research on prosocial behavior is still in its infancy, but the authors emphasize that progress will require meaningful collaborations between academics and industry partners. While reducing negative outcomes such as hate speech and misinformation online remains important, the authors argue that researchers should also investigate how social media platforms can help to actively foster cooperation, altruism, and collective problem-solving online. By understanding the causal factors that facilitate these prosocial interactions, we can work towards platforms that not only minimize harm but also maximize social benefit, leveraging social media’s unprecedented connective capabilities to create spaces where communities can thrive and address shared challenges.
A research agenda for encouraging prosocial behavior on social media was published in Nature Human Behaviour
AUTHORS
DELPHINE GARDINER
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Communications Specialist