Workshop’s Topic: Online toxicity poses a critical challenge for society, users, and social media platforms. The content moderation strategies, such as automated detection systems, volunteer human moderation, and identity disclosure, face persistent limitations. Recently, social media platforms have started to disclose users’ location information, with the hope that the disclosure can both maintain anonymity and hold users accountable. Despite its prevalence and promising expectations, it is still unknown whether disclosing users’ location really deters online toxicity. This research leverages a natural experiment with Sina Weibo’s compulsory location disclosure policy and explores its impact on user content generation and online toxicity. Our findings reveal that location disclosure unintendedly increased the overall ratio of toxic content, and the same pattern is observed for content with and without location names. We propose and empirically show three major reasons. First, the inhibition effect caused by identity disclosure should extend to the overall content generation, and it can have an even greater impact on non-toxic content than toxic content, which in turn increases the ratio of toxic content. Second, the policy can even intensify location-based toxicity, as users can leverage location information to engage in location-specific discrimination and incivility. Finally, the location disclosure activates location-based social group identity, fostering ingroup favoritism and outgroup hostility and thereby amplifying toxic content. These results provide important implications for the design of moderation policies on social media platforms. Identity disclosure, a strategy that appears beneficial, may have unintended negative consequences.

Time and Location: 9:00-10:00 AM (GMT+8), Room A423 (School of Management)

Language: Bilingual (Chinese and English)