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Category: Project

Description: Harassment toward online groups threatens basic rights to freedom of assembly and association when disruptions deter people from participating in groups they would otherwise join. Communities and individuals are most vulnerable to disruption when newcomers investigate potential group participation by learning community norms. If antagonists influence newcomers to misunderstand a community as hostile, those newcomers may not join. In such situations, behavioral interventions could bolster rights of association and assembly by updating the accuracy of newcomer norm perceptions. In this paper, we explore harassment’s disruption to rights of association in a series of qualitative, survey, and behavioral analyses with a large online feminism community. We then report on a field experiment that tests the effect of a norms-correction intervention on newcomer participation (n= 1300). This intervention increased two-week newcomer participation in the feminism group by 21% (p=0.002), an effect that persisted for at least two more months on average. A follow-up analysis found evidence that this effect applied to self-identified feminists (p=0.001) but not non-feminists (p=0.9). This study validates the influence of social norms in rights of assembly and association. It also demonstrates a behavioral intervention for supporting the uptake of those rights in communities under attack.