Toleration Factors: The Expectations of Decorum, Civility, and Certainty on Rural Social Media

This paper presents the understanding of the rural perception of toleration on Facebook by Bangladeshi users. In a three-year long ethnographic study with villagers in 12 rural areas in Jessore, Bangladesh, we investigated the three major aspects of toleration: decorum, civility, and certainty. Our findings informed that these factors influenced rural villagers’ interaction on social media. We found that to address these concerns, rural people often adopt their own framework where they co-existed with their own opinion along with the parties whose opinions were disagreeable to them. Here, the major concerns were unpredictable behavior of social media algorithms, conflicts of ideologies and cultural values, and mismatching language skills while using Facebook collectively and collaboratively within the family. We also found that the practice of toleration and associated factors influenced users’ interaction with other users both online and in the physical world. Building on our findings, we argue that understanding different conceptualizations of toleration is essential to have a safer digital space for marginalized rural communities. Our study contributes to HCI’s and ICTD’s understanding of disagreement and conflicts by bringing in the concept of toleration and helps design better appropriate Facebook experience for the users in rural Bangladesh and other similar communities.