Paper ID
3235
Paper Type
full
Description
Incivility between members is a major concern for many online communities. This paper provides empirical evidence that sleep deprivation is an important cause of incivility in online communities. Identification comes from the shift to Daylight Saving Time (DST) which leads to individuals experiencing reduced sleep time. Using an archival dataset from English Wikipedia and an annotated corpus, we train machine learning algorithms to automatically identify personal attack, aggressive, and toxic comments. We show that compared to other days, about 22% more uncivil messages originate from the impacted regions on the Mondays following the switch to DST. We also find that the effect is stronger for incivility on article talk pages compared with incivility on user talk pages. We discuss the strategies that can mitigate the harms to online communities due to sleep deprivation.
Recommended Citation
Mai, Feng; Chen, Zihan; and Lindberg, Aron, "Does Sleep Deprivation Cause Online Incivility? Evidence from a Natural Experiment" (2019). ICIS 2019 Proceedings. 32.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2019/crowds_social/crowds_social/32
Does Sleep Deprivation Cause Online Incivility? Evidence from a Natural Experiment
Incivility between members is a major concern for many online communities. This paper provides empirical evidence that sleep deprivation is an important cause of incivility in online communities. Identification comes from the shift to Daylight Saving Time (DST) which leads to individuals experiencing reduced sleep time. Using an archival dataset from English Wikipedia and an annotated corpus, we train machine learning algorithms to automatically identify personal attack, aggressive, and toxic comments. We show that compared to other days, about 22% more uncivil messages originate from the impacted regions on the Mondays following the switch to DST. We also find that the effect is stronger for incivility on article talk pages compared with incivility on user talk pages. We discuss the strategies that can mitigate the harms to online communities due to sleep deprivation.