Eksperimentas Vertimas

The "translation experiment" is a so-called video experiment to promote the new Lithuanian website www.svetimageda.lt, an online "handbook" with advices how to react to e.g. racist and homophobic hate speech in social and mass media. The short clip shows reactions of people who have been asked to translate racist facebook postings addressed to the person sitting in front of them.



"We predict that due to potential chronic traits and/or their adaptation to a Facebook culture of shallow processing and agreement, frequent Facebook users are highly susceptible to persuasive messages compared to less frequent users."

According to a study carried out by Rauch and Schanz in 2013, there is a positive correlation between the frequency of Facebook usage and agreement with racist messages online. The authors presented participants (n=623, all "white") three messages (one egalitarian, two racist). In general, participants were more likely to agree with the egalitarian message. In particular, there was a difference between high and low frequency users, i.e., high frequency users showed a higher tendency to agree with the two racist messages (a "superiority message" about whites being superior and a "victim message" about whites being the most oppressed ethnicity in the US). However, frequency is only one aspect that seems to be associated with this tendency; information seeking behaviour is another one. Those strongly motivated to seek information had a more positive attitude to the egalitarian message and a more negative attitude to the racist messages compared to low information seekers. The authors conclude that high frequency users and low information seekers show similar responses to both racist and anti-racist messages, "almost as if they were agreeing blindly" with messages. This is all correlational, causality is not clear. Social network sites such as Facebook are there to connect and the very combination of shallow processing and need to connect possibly "provides a warm, moist breeding ground for the spread of opinions, publicly and not-so-publicly. Racist ones among them." (via and via).