User correction against the violation of gender equality and social inclusion on social media? The role of the perceived sense of power, social inclusion, and social exclusion

Social media presents an avenue for increasing people relatedness and building communities but also can enable harmful communication including violating Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) principles. Besides technical solutions like natural language processing and user profiling; user corrections, where people actively challenge GESI violations, are crucial, due to the limitations of technical solutions in detecting sarcasm and humor and understanding context and linguistic styles. Several personal factors influence whether a person commits to pro-social behavior on social media and challenges others who violate GESI principles. In this paper, we study the impact of the factor of users’ perceived sense of power on social media, specifically, the extent to which they believe they have control over resources, interactions, or events. We also study the role of perceived social exclusion and inclusion on social media, referring to the extent to which users feel connected, respected, heard, or neglected, avoided, and isolated, respectively. Through an online survey, we collected data from 325 participants from the United Kingdom (UK) and 312 participants from the Arab Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), all of whom endorse GESI principles. The study results indicate that the sense of power enhances perceptions of social inclusion and mitigates feelings of social exclusion on social media platforms across both samples. The mediation analysis supported the full mediation role of social inclusion between the sense of power and challenging others who violate GESI in the Arab sample but was rejected in the UK sample. Additionally, social exclusion fully mediated this relationship in the Arab sample, whereas it only partially mediated it in the UK sample. We utilize the findings and argue the case that good social media platforms should be designed to enhance users’ perceptions of power and inclusion while minimizing feelings of exclusion, to encourage more active engagement and expression of opinions.