Incivility and toxicity have become concepts du jour in research about social media. The clear normative implication in much of this research is that incivility is bad and should be eliminated. Extensive research—including some that we’ve authored—has been dedicated to finding ways to reduce or eliminate incivility from online discussion spaces. In our work as part of the Civic Signals Initiative, we’ve been thinking carefully about what metrics should be adopted by social media platforms eager to create better spaces for their users. When we tell people about this project, removing incivility from the platforms frequently comes up as a suggested metric. In thinking about incivility, however, we’ve become less convinced that it is desirable, or even possible, for social media platforms to remove all uncivil content. In this short essay, we discuss research on incivility, our rationale for a more complicated normative stance regarding incivility, and what other orientations may be more useful. We conclude with a post mortem arguing that we should not abandon research on incivility altogether, but we should recognize the limitations of a concept that is difficult to universalize.

Objectives. To quantify and describe the incidence of misinformation about breast cancer on the social media platform Pinterest, a leading source of women’s health (e.g., breast cancer) information. Methods. We performed a hand-coded content analysis on 797 Pinterest posts (“pins”) mentioning the terms “breast cancer” or “breast” and “cancer,” collected in November 2018. Results. From the original sample of 797, 178 (22.3%) made a factual claim about what social media users could do to prevent or treat breast cancer. Of these, more than half—91 (51.1%)—contained misinformation. Therefore, 11.4% of the sample overall contained misinformation related to breast cancer prevention or treatment. Conclusions. Pinterest is a significant vector of misinformation about breast cancer, especially given the platform’s overwhelmingly female composition and its visual means of conveying information. Public Health Implications. Health practitioners should be aware of the myths circulating about breast cancer prevention and treatment and be prepared both to dismantle misinformation and to stress reliable health guidance. Meanwhile, Pinterest may wish to widen the criteria it uses for identifying health misinformation on its platform.

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