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arXiv · 2509.00696

Queuing for Civility: Regulating Emotions and Reducing Toxicity in Digital Discourse

Akriti Verma·Shama Islam·Valeh Moghaddam·Adnan Anwar
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Abstract

The pervasiveness of online toxicity, including hate speech and trolling, disrupts digital interactions and online well-being. Previous research has mainly focused on post-hoc moderation, overlooking the real-time emotional dynamics of online conversations and the impact of users' emotions on others. This paper presents a graph-based framework to identify the need for emotion regulation within online conversations. This framework promotes self-reflection to manage emotional responses and encourage responsible behaviour in real time. Additionally, a comment queuing mechanism is proposed to address intentional trolls who exploit emotions to inflame conversations. This mechanism introduces a delay in publishing comments, giving users time to self-regulate before further engaging in the conversation and helping maintain emotional balance. Analysis of social media data from Twitter and Reddit demonstrates that the graph-based framework reduced toxicity by 12%, while the comment queuing mechanism decreased the spread of anger by 15%, with only 4% of comments being temporarily held on average. These findings indicate that combining real-time emotion regulation with delayed moderation can significantly improve well-being in online environments.

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Akriti Verma, Shama Islam, Valeh Moghaddam, Adnan Anwar. 2025-08-31. Queuing for Civility: Regulating Emotions and Reducing Toxicity in Digital Discourse. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00696

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