Pause for a sec: what research says about prompts before posting
A gentle pause before sending something unkind can help. The effects are modest, which is why it's one layer of OurDot's safety design, not the whole thing.
In a large randomized experiment on Twitter, users prompted to reconsider a possibly offensive reply posted 6% fewer offensive tweets, kept posting fewer afterward, and received fewer offensive replies themselves. A study with teens found a reflective message or a short delay reduced their intention to harass. Prompts help a little; they don't stop bullying on their own.
What the research found
- Randomized experiment on Twitter (Katsaros, Yang & Fratamico, 2022): prompted users posted 6% fewer offensive tweets than unprompted users, created fewer offensive tweets later, and got fewer offensive replies. The study involved adults.
- Teens and reflective messages (Van Royen et al., 2017): among adolescents, a reflective message or a time delay before posting reduced their intention to harass. It measured intention, not behavior.
- Education helps too. A major review of youth internet-safety education (Finkelhor et al., 2021) found educational programs do appear to reduce cyberbullying.
Where experts disagree
The effects are real but modest. Automated word checks also make mistakes: they can flag jokes, dialects or reclaimed words, and miss unkindness that uses polite words. A widely quoted claim that "93% of teens change their minds" came from a science-fair project and wasn't peer reviewed, so we don't use it.
How this shaped OurDot
When a post, or a kid's chat message, looks unkind, OurDot asks the writer to pause. They can still send it; the check runs on the phone, and guardians see a weekly count of posts made after a pause. In chats with kids, explicit words can't be sent at all. The pause works alongside guardian visibility, reporting and blocking, and lessons like "Be an Upstander."
What we don't claim
- That OurDot stops cyberbullying.
- That any automated check catches all unkindness.
Sources
- Katsaros, Yang & Fratamico, "Reconsidering Tweets," Proceedings of ICWSM (2022)
- Van Royen et al., "Thinking before posting?" Computers in Human Behavior (2017)
- Finkelhor et al., "Youth Internet Safety Education," Trauma, Violence, & Abuse (2021)
- Cyberbullying Research Center on the ReThink statistic (2015)