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Study Finds That Banning Trolls Works, To Some Degree (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On October 5, 2015, facing mounting criticism about the hate groups proliferating on Reddit, the site banned a slew of offensive subreddits, including r/Coontown and r/fatpeoplehate, which targeted Black people and those with weight issues. But did banning these online groups from Reddit diminish hateful behavior overall, or did the hate just spread to other places? A new study from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Emory University, and University of Michigan examines just that, and uses data collected from 100 million Reddit posts that were created before and after the aforementioned subreddits were dissolved. Published in the journal ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, the researchers conclude that the 2015 ban worked. More accounts than expected discontinued their use on the site, and accounts that stayed after the ban drastically reduced their hate speech. However, studies like this raise questions about the systemic issues facing the internet at large, and how our culture should deal with online hate speech. First, the researchers automatically extracted words from the banned subreddits to create a dataset that included hate speech and community-specific lingo. The researchers looked at the accounts of users who were active on those subreddits and compared their posting activity from before and after those offensive subreddits were banned. The team was able to monitor upticks or drops in the hate speech across Reddit and if that speech had "migrated" to other subreddits as a result.
...who gets to define who the trolls are and what constitutes Trolling?
Is it like Pornography?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Wasn't there a study that showed that folks that vent online were less likely to grab a semiautomatic .233 and a few banana clips and shoot up the place?
Biding their time for the light to falter. . .
Hilariously, I'm also a founding moderator of coontown. This study cracks me up, it is totally moronic. Anyways, AMA.
Did we need more proof that censorship has a chilling effect?
When you purge opposing views, of course it will be effective. That said, the study used a very subjective definition. It used a very specific and politically defined version to classify people.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
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Just check this site.
You've been treated so unfairly, it's no wonder you're crying like a baby.
Researchers answered the question of "did the hate just spread to other places" by checking only the place that banned it...
Sounds legit
You want to see what people are saying; you want them to suffer ridicule in public debate.
This hasn't solved any issue. It has just swept the problem under the rug.
Did the "hate speech" on Reddit move to other subreddits?
NO - therefore the this stopped people from being hateful.
This is just more dumb-ass pseudo-science that is increasingly, frighteningly, coming from our "higher education" centers.
Those whose voices were blocked on this forum realized they'd be ostracized everywhere on Reddit so they went to ANOTHER FORUM.
This doesn't even take into account that the same people DID try to create other subreddits of the same kind that were also promptly squelched and that a lynch mob of SJW heroes and mods will block anybody that were even subscribed to those groups, regardless of whether they even posted!
It doesn't stop the actions, it doesn't stop the beliefs of the people involved and it doesn't go away. The only way this happens is by actually engaging the people involved (of all ideologies) and talking it out. That's the only way to promote understanding.
Censorship is never the answer.
Seriously, did the vice reporter make sure his hair gel was in and his skinny jeans looked right before he made this article? Why on earth would I possibly not take vice news seriously???
I've had posts marked down as troll because people disagreed with the points raised.
Trolling is making inflammatory statements for the sake of getting people to respond. Disagreeing with a position does not make it a troll post.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Hate is just another opinion. How can you objectively say whether it's good or bad? It just is. We don't need censorship and self-rightous "know-it-alls" to do our thinking for us. Some people's hate is some other people's wisdom. Coexist.
Seems the trolls came to Slashdot after the ban.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
This article sounds like another bit of justification for what Silicon Valley has already started to do (effectively banning all conservatives from posting on the internet). See the sig.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Ok. I'll bite. You're a n1993r!
entire site. They wanted racists and fat-haters to post more often in order subreddits, and it worked.
I use reddit to get my point and speech to be politically correct - a testing ground.
In the real world - person to person - world, you don't get feedback. You get no response and things just happen to you. (I'd rather get feedback immediately to what I said and then take it from there. Like, no jobs, HR bullshit, and other things I can't think of) THAT you get online - THANK YOU TROLLS!
See, in polite company you very rarely get honest feedback - at best something that could be taken in many many many ways - "Of course you are ..." - is whitewashed and behind your back they screw you. (How may of you have slammed a guy who was incompetent on the job when asked about job references?)
The interweb is great for testing opinions and how to say them.
I'd rather get mod'ed down into oblivion on a web site than speak my mind (without feedback) in real life and getting ostracized .
Yes, I do test myself here and on reddit with throw-away accounts. Hence, why I'm an AC and shall always be.
it's their site.
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The only way I've seen work is opening up posts to public up/downvotes. There are a lot of crotchety old buzzkills on /. but trolls get nuked pretty quickly.
All they proved is that you hear your own echo in your snazzy echo chamber a lot easier if you ban dissent.
which targeted Black people
People with the surname Black?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I remember when those subs were banned, and there was much discussion of them all moving to Voat.com or something. The set of places to which they migrated is bounded by the entire Internet, and thus not practical to measure. A more complete study would at least attempt to find places where they could have migrated. Also, does the banning really change the mind of a hard-core racist or does it just throw them into an echo chamber or increase their sense of persecution. It's hard to measure some of these things.
Correlation is not causation. Gee, I wonder if people voluntarily left Plebbit when they started seriously censoring the place? Surely their free speech platform hypocrisy had no effect, right?
The question was if trolls moved to other platforms to continue their hate speech.
Not if banning trolls on one platform results in less trolling on that platform.
Was there ever any doubt that banning people who use hate speech results in less hate speech being used on the platform?
First, the researchers automatically extracted words from the banned subreddits to create a dataset that included hate speech and community-specific lingo. The researchers looked at the accounts of users who were active on those subreddits and compared their posting activity from before and after those offensive subreddits were banned. The team was able to monitor upticks or drops in the hate speech across Reddit and if that speech had "migrated" to other subreddits as a result.
How do they know if the person using the "N" word is black, in which case it's considered OK, or non-black, in which case it's an obvious crime against all humanity? Or calling someone a fag is OK for Milo but wrong for normal people? Granted certain sub-forums are likely largely one demographic but word based still seems flawed.
if banning some subredits removes some of the trolls, then removing all subredits will remove all of the trolls.
By removing all the platforms that trolls infest, we can eradicate trolls altogether --- I mean who in their right mind couldn't do without redit, twitter, youtube, facebook, and all those other dens of trollery?
>> But did banning these online groups from Reddit diminish hateful behavior overall, or did the hate just spread to other places?
In the case of Gawker, after being body-slammed by the Hulkster, the hate spread through the rest of Gizmodo filling the entire site with political jabs and hateful snarks. It became Gawkmodo.
Hate-speech hate. Reject ... and shove it up-the-azzwhole of SJW snowflakes, dikdyke femi-nazis, Trotsky pil-pulling blo-jobbers, media Google-slams and DemoRat nibberizing vote-herders. Shove it so far and so hard envaginated pilgrims believe they spent the month in SanFran.
I'm going to pretend that was a sincere question instead of another bit of first-post drivel.
Each person should be free to define what to regard as a waste of time. Given that freedom, I would certain define trolls as worthless wasters of my precious time. Sometimes a troll can be thought-provoking, but it's only accidental, and I'd much prefer to spend my limited time with nice people, which leads to my suggestion:
Let the trolls flush themselves. Simply by being rude trolls, their negative reputations should proceed them and allow me to render them invisible. Unfortunately, the sock puppet problem calls for tipping the scales a bit against newbies (until they earn a positive reputation), but public dialog would be greatly improved by a system to aggregate and display earned public reputations. Even if you didn't want to filter them out entirely, you would be able to better decide where to focus your attention. AtAJG, LMDSAuPR.
By the way, many corporate websites are already aggregating all sorts of information about you. Unfortunately, they are harvesting that information for their greater profit, NOT to benefit you or people who might be interested in you for positive reasons. It's really a religious thing: There is no gawd but Profit, and Profit's prophets are Apple, Gilead, Google, Exxon, and some big gamblers. (By "gamblers", I mean large banks and other speculators playing "profitable" games with money. This list of 2016's biggest prophets is due to Fortune.) I think we could do better, but Slashdot will NOT lead the way.
Now for the more important question: Is it even worth the time to search the discussion in hopes of an actually funny comment? Were I only able to help fund new features for Slashdot, a search for funniest comments of the week might be worth a few of my bucks...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
One of the things that destroyed usenet was rampaging trolls. The kill-list was a weak response that ultimately availed naught. That is why I advocate for a more proactive reputation-based-filtering solution. You might choose to stuff your eyes and ears with tripe, but I would prefer not to.
There is a great deal of confusion about "freedom" and "free speech". Your freedom to speak freely should not block my freedom to ignore idiots. Not that I'm calling you an idiot. Yet. However, if I had to make a prediction based on your short comment...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
nuff said.
Can I interest you in a cup of public-reputation-based proactive filtering? Wouldn't you rather spend your time with nice people, perhaps with a tilt in favor of people who have even better reputations than your own?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
A few months ago, the Denver Post switched their comment section to something called "Civil Comments"
Our article comments have been a cesspool of trolls and spam for years. Enter Civil Comments. Civil Comments is intended to bring back the civil in online discourse
The idea is every time you post a comment you are required to rate several other comments as either "Civil" or "Not Civil", but if you are "wrong" too many times you might get banned. That is, if you rate a comment as "Civil" when enough other people say it's "Uncivil" you get warnings at first and are told to click a button saying you agree to rate comments fairly.
It's also persistent - once I was asked to rate the same comment 4 or 5 times in a row and I kept saying it was "Uncivil" (it was a response to someone with "Richard" in their name and the comment called him "Dick" as an obvious insult).
I took the same approach as I do here - I'm not going to downvote (or rate as "Uncivil") a comment just because I disagree with it but I soon discovered that rating a comment as "Uncivil" was much less risky than rating a questionable comment as "Civil".
And abuse still exists although it has curtailed some of it. I still see uncivil comments and I see what I consider civil comments removed presumably just because someone disagreed.
If a post is removed it reads:
this comment did not meet civility standards
None of my comments were ever removed AFAIK, but I kept getting warnings for misrating other people's comments. The last straw was when I rated a questionable comment as "Civil" even though I disagreed with its point. It was mostly opinion, but the facts stated were true. It was the kind of comment I'd have rather recused myself from rating but in the interest of fairness and not rating anything I disagreed with as "Uncivil" I rated it as "Civil". I guess I was wrong.
Since then I haven't even bothered to comment or even log in to rate other people's posts. I don't think I'm actually banned as long as I'm willing to click that button.
And I'm better off for not participating. There are a handful of regulars who post there and you can probably predict what they're going to say about any particular article. Very few comments are anything but the usual partisan BS that isn't funny and certainly doesn't add any insight to the article.
So apparently you can have limited success suppressing free speech who knew
Study finds limiting free speech successfully stifles the spread of ideas... to some degree.
... results is good behaviour.
This should not be surprising, the majority of people will follow the community leaders, and the social standards they espouse.
Here is another good point from a 2005 munich university study - hate speech wasn't a topic back then, only flaming:
allowing flaming on a respectable website will
1. drag down this websites standards in all aspects
2. make flaming more widely accepted especially on this website but also outside
3. drives out old customers objecting flaming
4. brings in new customers prefering flaming
All of this is pretty obvious but you will be surprised how little the editorial staff is aware of this.
I have seen exactly this on several local major web pages. If you don't clean up you yard it will start to smell.
You want a really nice hate speech web site? Visit Telepolis, the most radical main stream anti-West/US/EU/Democracy hating site on german internet. The US has created Stalin, Hitler, cancer and whatever and everyone and their pillow is a CIA slave. But thanks there is golden angel putin around to protect us with his nuclear weapons. The same site is also running Heise Tech News. Their forums are cleaned with a more strict rule but still consider it ok to spread radical propaganda as long as noone gets called bad names. Every third forum message is stupid and worth reporting and it never stops. Then visit Computerbase.de, Golem.de. Basically every unproven accussation is removed. Yes, this leads to less forum traffic but also to a much higher quality. Also People do not even try to post stupid stuff over there coz it gets removed anyway. On the other hand I even read good critic about the west there instead of mindless hating.
Seriously, kick out the idiots and get a smarter forum.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
The forums were.
So my take is different from that of the article.
People, generally, model their behaviour on those around them in a social group. They go to different forums, and they find that what was considered typical is very extreme for the new group.
So the way to deal with these attitudes is to integrate them into more moderate groups. This is very much the opposite of what a lot of groups do, where those with attitudes that are considered wrong are ejected from the group.
Let's keep playing fast and loose with the meaning of Hate Speech.
See where it gets us.
Fat People Hate was a terrible place, without a doubt, but they stayed in their little box and didn't attempt to invade other subreddits. They moved to Voat, which has also become an awful place, but they maintained their standards of behavior -- being dicks to people who don't really deserve it (and a few who do), but not trying to stir up shit in other groups. Since what they did was deliberately steered away from abuse of the network, I felt they had every right to continue. Of course, advertisers call the shots now, so if it's not palatable to Big Money, it's banished or at least demonetized.
I can't say the same for subreddits that escaped the purge, like Shit Reddit Says. They survived because they are left-leaning trolls rather than right-leaning, despite being much worse about direct abuse of other groups and users.
In any case, I nuked my entire Reddit history before closing my account there, and although I have read a few subreddits when I need information found only there, I accept that I cannot respond or ask questions myself. I moved to Voat for a while until it became nothing but an extension of /pol/.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
It's a load. 'Trolls' are defined by those who don't agree with what they're saying.
Of course classical hate speech is one thing, but I've been called a troll by so many, for so many reasons. Mainly because logic seems to make many look dumb, which they don't like, then inherently you're a troll.
Saltwater tank hobby aquariums are the worst. I've been banned there more times than I can count. Some of which include, voicing my support for a presidential candidate, telling people their eyeballs are not full-proof methods to judging health of a fish/coral, and telling people it's bad if a fish/coral ingests plastic particulates.
Go ahead, goto reef2reef or reefcentral or thereeftank, best sites to see just how ignorant humans are.
Actually, this may be a stretch, but I believe that the 2015 reddit crackdown on "hate subs" not only didn't have the intended effect, it contributed a LOT to Donald Trump's election. /r/the_donald arose when all of the people who had their communities destroyed had nowhere else to go, and attracted a lot of other people who would never post to /r/coontown or even read it, but were outraged that reddit decided they didn't get to exist any more. I don't agree with any of those subs, but I'm far more disgusted by reddit's high and mighty moralizing and self-righteousness than anything anybody's ever posted on any of them.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
did banning these online groups from Reddit diminish hateful behavior overall, or did the hate just spread to other places?
And to study whether the "hate" spread, they proceeded to study only Reddit and not other sites where it would have spread if the null hypothesis were false.
"What are studies designed and conducted by gender studies morons, Alex."
Then I should expect to get modded Insightful, too.
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