Dutch citizens increasingly perceive society as more polarized than it is, which undermines social cohesion and trust in democratic institutions. Despite active moderation, Nu.nl—a major news website reaching up to 40% of the Dutch population monthly2— has inadvertently reinforced this perceived polarization. This effect is driven partly by a minority of disproportionately vocal, right-leaning commenters, and by highly divisive comments surrounding Israel’s war on Gaza. Together with Nu.nl’s moderation team, we conducted interviews and reviewed internal Nu.nl user data indeed revealing that a minority of highly active commenters generates a large share of polarizing content.

Moderate Nu.nl readers less active in the comment section may have a false perception about how polarized it is. Consequently, they may silence themselves, falsely believing that their moderate opinion is a minority position. A constructive democratic debate, however, should include moderate voices and thus break this false perception of polarization. Our field experiment investigates: How can we a) reduce perceived polarization online comments, and b) encourage participation of more “moderate” users on NU.nl?
Together with Nu.nl, we designed and pre-tested two visual interventions to display above the comment sections of Israel-Palestine news articles.

Intervention 1 corrects misperceptions by visualizing people’s real, moderate opinions on a general statement about the Israel-Palestine conflict that is perceived to be polarized but is not. Intervention 2 draws on psychological theory and internal Nu.nl research to create a welcoming space for moderate users, emphasizing shared motivations. We will analyze changes in quality of user comments on Nu.nl (DV1), and changes in moderate user commenting (DV2) when we display each intervention.

We also test boundary effects of our proposed mechanism: beyond an “optimum level,” psychological safety elicited by our interventions may discourage moderate users from commenting if they believe other moderates will instead (“online bystander effect” 6).

Supervisors:

Academy Assistants: tba