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Paper Number
ICIS2025-1881
Paper Type
Short
Abstract
Online social media platforms enable the swift dissemination of harmful content, such as hate speech, misinformation, and extremist propaganda, that threatens democratic values and fosters political cynicism. Traditional content moderation methods are expensive and frequently struggle to catch all harmful material. We suggest attitude inoculation as a preventive approach that builds resistance to negative attitudinal changes by exposing individuals to diluted versions of problematic attitudes. Given its protective effects, we anticipate that developing a future-oriented mindset through inoculation will help individuals resist problematic attitudes propagated through social media content. We propose a 3x2 experimental research design to assess our hypotheses. In this study, we will compare education on netiquette (i.e., the morals and values of responsible online behavior) with future-oriented inoculation messages of varying specificity. This research lays the foundation for implementing and evaluating inoculation interventions as content moderation tools and explaining the dissemination behaviors of problematic social media actors.
Recommended Citation
Dürr, Marco, "Mitigating the Effects of Harmful Social Media Content through Attitude Inoculation" (2025). ICIS 2025 Proceedings. 12.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2025/is_good/is_good/12
Mitigating the Effects of Harmful Social Media Content through Attitude Inoculation
Online social media platforms enable the swift dissemination of harmful content, such as hate speech, misinformation, and extremist propaganda, that threatens democratic values and fosters political cynicism. Traditional content moderation methods are expensive and frequently struggle to catch all harmful material. We suggest attitude inoculation as a preventive approach that builds resistance to negative attitudinal changes by exposing individuals to diluted versions of problematic attitudes. Given its protective effects, we anticipate that developing a future-oriented mindset through inoculation will help individuals resist problematic attitudes propagated through social media content. We propose a 3x2 experimental research design to assess our hypotheses. In this study, we will compare education on netiquette (i.e., the morals and values of responsible online behavior) with future-oriented inoculation messages of varying specificity. This research lays the foundation for implementing and evaluating inoculation interventions as content moderation tools and explaining the dissemination behaviors of problematic social media actors.
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