Aviv Barnoy

This chapter investigates how online conversational environments might be designed to promote epistemic health rather than merely reduce incivility. Drawing on the authors’ empirically informed collaboration with an industry partner developing engagement platforms for publishers, it argues that prevailing industry approaches to “healthy conversation” disproportionately prioritize civility norms while neglecting epistemic norms governing truth, evidence, and inquiry. The analysis distinguishes epistemic toxicity from incivility and examines existing moderation tools, reporting systems, and fact-checking practices, showing that most rely on the identification of manifest norm violations—an approach well suited to detecting insults or harassment but ill suited to tracking misinformation or evidential deficiencies. Survey data from platform users further reveal a striking mismatch between industry priorities and user expectations: participants value epistemic quality at least as highly as civility. To explain this gap, the chapter introduces the “violation-identification problem,” according to which breaches of epistemic norms are typically non-manifest and therefore resistant to automated or surface-level detection. The discussion concludes that improving epistemic health online requires a shift away from civility-centered moderation toward design strategies modeled on high-quality offline epistemic practices, especially those foregrounding evidential standards and norms of inquiry.

This article highlights the role of epistemic norms in mitigating the spread of misinformation. The mixed-methods study includes exploratory reconstructions and survey experiments. Two intervention approaches proved efficient in reducing the sharing of misinformation, but only one significantly differentiated between true and false information. This study contributes to the literature on normative countermeasures and is the first to emphasize epistemic norms. Although misinformation is fundamentally an epistemic issue, scholars rarely refer to the rich epistemic literature for conceptualization and theory. The article also draws on focus theory and additional social literature to ensure a holistic framework. In addition to underscoring the role of epistemic norms, we suggest temporal proximity as a new factor to consider in focus theory-based measures. Ethical, empirical, and practical implications are discussed, emphasizing the need to control for countermeasures’ effect on true information sharing, which may threaten to suppress public discourse.

Fostering healthy online conversations is essential to the integrity of public discourse, yet the norms that guide such conversations remain contested and difficult to enforce. This paper develops and empirically grounds a conceptual and empirical framework for understanding and addressing online toxicity. Building on the distinction between epistemic and civil norms, we argue that norm violations are the proper target of moderation. While this paper is primarily conceptual, it is informed by empirical observations drawn from a collaboration with a platform designer. Drawing on a dataset of user comments and responses to moderation scenarios, we identify eight recurring types of norm violations and analyse patterns of user agreements about whether such content should be removed. Our findings reveal that while civil norm violations prompt relatively consistent responses, epistemic violations elicit wide disagreement, raising challenges for universal moderation standards. We conclude by proposing a set of general, evidence-informed principles for platform designers and moderators. These recommendations emphasise context-sensitive moderation, platform affordances that encourage epistemic responsibility, and the integration of civil and epistemic considerations into online infrastructure. Our work bridges theoretical and practical perspectives, offering both conceptual clarity and actionable insights for scholars, designers, and practitioners engaged in shaping healthier digital discourse.