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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.
Exactly. Banning will only encourage people to put down their keyboards and pick up a gun. They don't realize how the 1st Amendment diffuses the need for the 2nd. If the boiler can't vent, it will explode.
OK, I'll ask you something.
Back in the days of Usenet (e.g. alt.syntax.tactical), the point of trolling was to be as clever and sharp as possible. Today, the point is to be as blunt and moronic as possible.
What happened? Was it weev?
Nope, not a government website, 1st Amendment doesn't apply. Stay in kids school, don't make this incredibly embarrassing and ignorant mistake about the 1st Amendment.
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
Counterpoint: Canada. Up here we don't have a first or second amendment and surprisingly we're not on the verge of exploding. Unless our team doesn't win the Cup.
Researchers answered the question of "did the hate just spread to other places" by checking only the place that banned it...
I caught that as well.
Unimaginably bad conclusion they drew given the data. Almost as if instead of scientists that they are lowly sociologists, a professions where getting away with pretending that its science is its only redeeming quality.
"His name was James Damore."
Why do you oppose the rights of Silicon Valley organizations to not host content they find offensive? (As if it makes sense to talk about "Silicon Valley" as a monolithic entity, like Tinder and Tumblr are likely to have similar codes of ethics.)
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
What the summary fails to mention is that most of the people who left Reddit went over to Voat. They were not silenced, just asked to leave the venue and take their speech somewhere else.
If you really want to indulge in some fat-hate you can still get your fix. Are you really arguing that Reddit should host whatever you deem fit to post? It's there any line that should not be crossed?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
Trolls don't create. You only destroy. When the creators take back control, trolls lose. Always.
I tried some clever trolling, but got modded +Insightful instead. Very frustrating.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Mate, that's a really sodding stupid comment. All you've done is ignore everything he wow and go work "you're so emotional!!111!1one".
Not wanting to have every thread infested with trolls is not the same as being ruled by emotions. Sometimes, most times actually, grown-ups want to have grown up conversations that aren't interspersed with pejoratives about black people, neo Nazi rhetoric and so on and so forth.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Ah of course, because being told "please don't be such a big asshole to people who have never done anything to you" is the worst tyranny anybody can ever experience right ?
And that is teh TOTALITY of what PC and social justice consists off. If you consider that tyranny - then you must be an asshole of such irredeemable proportions that failing to act like one and spread shit all over innocent people would literally cause you to die.
What a wonderful life you must lead, if the worst oppression you've ever experienced is decent people telling you to stop acting like a douchebag.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *