A mockup of an intervention showing a Twitter comment, but it has a new button along the bottom that shows how many people have viewed the tweet.

Show Content Reach (# of Views)

Evoke self-consciousness for post conscientiousness

Our confidence rating

Emergent

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What It Is

This counts, and relays back to the user, the number of distinct users who have seen a post or comment that user has made.

Different methodologies to count views could be used by different platforms, so long as they are consistent within the platform.

This view meter must be clear and distinct from other social metrics relayed back to users, such as the number of upvotes/likes, shares/retweets, &c.

Civic Signal Being Amplified

Understand
:
Promote thoughtful conversation

When To Use It

Reactive

What Is Its Intended Impact

  • People will compose their own posts/comments with more care because they realize how big their audience really is
  • People will respond less to trolls who have gotten comparatively few views

Evidence That It Works

Evidence That It Works

  • Facebook (2013) conducted an analysis of survey data to understand the discrepancy between users' perceptions of their audience and their actual audience.
  • They found that users consistently thought their audience was much smaller (27% of true size).

Why It Matters

According to researchers from the Facebook study: "Users have scarce information about who actually sees their content, making their audience seem invisible and difficult to estimate." this can lead to over-disclosure and a lack of self-censorship.

Special Considerations

Examples

This intervention entry currently lacks photographic evidence (screencaps, &c.)

Citations

Quantifying the Invisible Audience in Social Networks

Michael Bernstein, Eytan Bakshy, Moira Burke, Brian Karrer
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)
April 27, 2013

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Further reading

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