Slashdot Mirror
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.
Seems the trolls came to Slashdot after the ban.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
No, there was no such study.
You are welcome on my lawn.
> Oppressors and the oppressed are not morally interchangeable. It's amazing that there are still people that don't get that.
We don't get it because it's WRONG. You are trying to claim that moral rules obey identity politics. That's pretty much the opposite of what liberalism is supposed to believe in. All rules apply to everyone equally.
You don't get a free pass or an automatic death sentence just because of a label someone can hang on you.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
Surely if they want to encourage lively discussion they should ban the people who try to sabotage it with fat shaming and extreme racism.
Trolls aren't trying to improve the quality of discussion. They aren't trying to put forward unpopular opinions (you can do that without calling someone a n!gger). They are trying to sabotage the debate, to drive people away or silence them.
Trolls actually stop people discussing controversial topics. They make lively debate impossible.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC