14 Policy Brief No. 45 Toda Peace Institute SexWithDogs, they missed another forum called DogSex. Undeniably, transparency will reveal that sort of thing. Equally, such embarrassments are trivial given what is at stake. Recommendations: Intervention Categories and Their Costs and Benefits All the interventions discussed above can be sorted into broad categories. The list below recommends a set of categories, sorted by how aggressive they feel to their subjects, from least invasive to most invasive. 1. Outside Support The platform creates or sponsors an intervention that does not affect user experience on its own platform but is relevant to its ecosystem. Examples include Google’s creation of the separate fact-checking search engine (which may be integrated into its search results but has not yet), or Jigsaw’s creation of PerspectiveAPI, which helps content-creation organisations outside Google moderate comments on their own websites. 2. Custom Interventions After investing in careful research, a platform may devise an intervention that is not easily described in general terms. If you are looking for more to read when you finish this brief, try Sarah Jeong’s 2015 book The Internet of Garbage; she reviews these issues in-depth and concludes that the best interventions are highly specific to the platform and are developed after deep research, often in partnership with outside researchers or users. For example, Jeong tells the story of an online game that had a significant harassment problem, which largely took place over direct messages. The game changed direct messages so that users had to consent to receive them from other users, and its harassment problem largely disappeared — an excellent example of a custom intervention that operated without invading users’ space or silencing public speech. (This intervention required specialised knowledge to implement because direct messages worked differently in the game, and had unusual dynamics, compared to other platforms. For example, most harassment on Twitter does not take place in direct messages, so a similar intervention would not work there.) 3. Label The platform adds clear descriptions or context labels to items on the platform, like content, usernames, or profiles. Examples include Facebook’s Context button on news items, or Facebook’s labels that describe a political candidate’s party and candidate status. As long as labels are developed respectfully, they are a good way to improve users’ awareness of the broader context without restricting speech. 4. Re-Design The platform changes affordances to achieve a certain result. Examples include the Stroud experiment of trying a “Respect” button rather than a “Like” button, which yielded less polarised conversation. Many of these examples can change discourse, sometimes significantly, so it is important to have a sense of guiding values while making those changes: For example, would we prefer a less polarised discourse? 5. Moderate the Conversation Careful, humane, personal conversation and moderation may be the most important strategy available for peacebuilding purposes. Examples of conversation moderation from