Paginademedia.ro and Blogsport.ro get part in the Less Hate, More Speech project

As of today, two other websites, paginademedia.ro and blogsport.ro, will be part of the sites moderated within the research project Less Hate, More Speech, undergone by Median Research Centre (MRC). They will join the sites the project initially started with, gsp.ro and tolo.ro.

Therefore, besides the moderation of the comments, the two sites will also take part in the achievement of the research experiments. Like the initial sites, they will also take over the terms and conditions for comments established within the project, while the MRC researchers will test under various forms the most efficient moderation methods, aimed to nurture a civilized online environment.

The preliminary data show that within the first month from the implementation of moderation on gsp.ro the rate of moderated comments amounted to 28.9% of the total comments, not taking into account the spam messages, and after 9 months, by December 2015, it dropped to 19.2%. At the same time, on tolo.ro, in the first month, October 2015, the rate was 32.1% and after 3 months it dropped to 11.8%.

In total, approximately 400,000 thousand comments were moderated during April – December 2015.

And ranking first in the top of the most used categories of hate speech are vulgar or offensive language, racism and intolerance towards ill or disabled people.

The Less Hate, More Speech project, a joint work of MRC, Central European University in Budapest and the University of Bergen, aims to study the situations when the anti-democratic and hateful attitudes may be diminished within the public speech, in the online environment, as well as in the politicians’ discourses.