Empathy in the Digital Age: Implications for Content Moderation and Platform Governance

Abstract Concerns about the toxicity of the internet and social media are widespread. Many reasons have been offered for why social media increases online toxicity, from bad algorithms to the rise of online trolling, but perhaps the most prominent explanation has been the negative effects of social media on empathy. In this paper, we offer a framework of digital empathy by first outlining a descriptive account of digital empathy, encompassing both affective and cognitive components. By “digital empathy”, we mean empathy mediated through digital environments. We also explore the normative impacts of platforms on digital empathy and offer four main categories of moral assessment: (1) morally problematic one-off failures of digital empathy; (2) aggregate harms of failures of digital empathy; (3) impacts of recommendation systems on digital empathy by amplifying, obscuring, framing, and rushing targets of empathy; and (4) moral deskilling of empathy due to widespread use of social media. We also critically explore harm-based justifications for moderating content to explicitly govern empathetic relationships between users of a platform. We demonstrate how discussions of digital empathy can inform and enhance broader debates about the ethics of online content moderation, thereby further illuminating the moral, social, and political implications of social media’s role in facilitating user interactions.