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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.
A lot of us have moved to Mastodon, which is like Twitter but federated like email. You can host your own Mastodon instance (server) and set your own local policies. Then your users can talk to users on my instance, just like Outlook users can email people at Gmail.
But! I can set my own policies, too. If your users are causing problems for mine, I can completely disconnect from you and end the problem from my side. This is an excellent situation. Instances that are too tolerant of trolls find themselves disconnected from the network. Instances that are too thin-skinned and that server connections too quickly end up the same. Either way, their more mainstream users are likely to flee to more moderately administered instances, so there's a nice feedback loop that optimizes for common decency above other extremes.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I never said they were, only implied that they should do so, especially if they want to encourage lively discussion. I also think it's interesting that the side they've chosen has a history of bitching just as loudly (if not more) when they are denied the 'soapbox' due to organizational limits or laws.
So if some site decided to toss all them "pinko commis" off their site for expressing left wing views, you'd be ok with that?
Yes, of course!
I'm not the OP, but this has already happened multiple times. Gab and PewTube both regularly ban left leaning users and channels. One of PewTube's most popular videos was about communism, until they deleted it.
And that's fine. That's how it should be. If videos about communism trigger the poor snowflakes, they are welcome to build a safe space for themselves.
Let me ask you a question. Would you be okay if I came and set up my soap box in your living room? Ideally right in front of the TV. Come on, don't censor me bro. Support free speech, let me into your home to show just how dedicated you are to hearing the full range of opinions.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC