HTML Entities in BuddyPress message excerpts

The attached screenshot shows what happens if I include an appostrophe or other characters into the contents of a message. The output preview turns it into an HTML entitiy that is confusing for end users. 

The excerpt seems to be coming from the Buddypress plugin in this format, but I'm hoping it would be possible for the Thrive theme to process the entities back into their proper characters using this function - https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/wp_specialchars_decode/

Buddypress builds this content via the following file.

and the filters to the excerpt are applied in:

Thanks for any suggestions. If you're able to provide a temporary fix (that I can add in my functions file) prior to rolling a possible solution into a theme update, I'd greatly appreciate it.