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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.
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.
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?
Yes but it also turns out that if you label the banana clips 'organic' they feel the need to complain online again and end up in an infinite loop so it's a manageable problem.
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?
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.
Because the internet is for regular people now. Most clever trolls wouldn't even be noticed....
love is just extroverted narcissism
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
Seems the trolls came to Slashdot after the ban.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Oh, there's really no such thing as "underground" on the Internet. Even on the dark web, insofar as they can find each other, other people can find them.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I just wish we could hear a few wise words on this subject from our now-retired chiropractor troll.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
it's their site.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
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.
which targeted Black people
People with the surname Black?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
No, there was no such study.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yep. What actually happened is the moved to other forums outside of reddit. Regardless, if you can't have an honest conversation, you're not having a conversation.
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."
As I'm sure you're aware, he's making an argument, not interpreting the law. Free expression does diffuse the need for physical violence. It doesn't matter whether the censor is the state or private. Shut down communication (especially the uncomfortable kind) long enough and the conflict will escalate.
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.
> You don't even have a football team.
What are you on about? We have 9, and we play the superior 3 down CFL rules. Sad American teams need that 4th down as a crutch.
> You'll be overrun by "refugees" soon enough
Hysterical xenophobes have been saying that for decades and yet here we are.
> If it wasn't for the Brits, you would have lost the war of 1812 to the American freedom fighters.
Uh, in 1812 we WERE Brits. So your argument is if it wasn't for us, we would have lost? Sure. I guess that's true for any victors anywhere. Another interpretation of that would be that the Colonies managed to win their independence when the Empire got bored of fighting them, but then they thought they'd try and take some of the Empire and got their asses handed to them. Nice second White House. Pity about the first.
Sorry, you are wrong
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I tried some clever trolling, but got modded +Insightful instead. Very frustrating.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
You realize, of course, that those aren't related in any way. There are many reasons you can't discriminate against someone, but many more reasons why you can. I can refuse to serve you because I don't like the shirt you're wearing or your cologne or your haircut (as long as those aren't proxies for your race, sex, or national origin).
But more importantly, there's an enormous legal gap between who you are and what you've done. It's not OK to kick you out of my restaurant because you're white. It's way OK to kick you out because you crapped on the floor and peed on another diner's cheeseburger.
The closest real-world analogy to your straw man is that you can't refuse to bake cakes for a Methodist. That's explicitly illegal. You can surely refuse to bake cakes for the specific Methodist who knocked up your sister. Now do you understand how this all works in reality-land?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Free speech is an idea that came out of the age of enlightenment and the general gist is that we should let people have their say rather than censoring them because that just bottles up their anger and pisses them off even more.
Turns out, we're debating this in an article about a study that concludes otherwise.
Expressing thought and emotion is one of those basics rights
To be clear, you have the absolute right to express yourself. You have no right to express yourself in my living room after I've told you to leave.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
How would you feel if you were labeled conservative-hater and banned from /. just for that? If you really want to indulge in some conservative-bashing you can still get your fix on Reddit.
My kingdom for mod points...
Because the internet is for regular people now. Most clever trolls wouldn't even be noticed....
I'll just leave this right here.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Whenever I see an American and a Canadian arguing about Canada versus America, I think of this:
http://www.harkavagrant.com/in...
#DeleteChrome
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.
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.
There is nothing the slightest bit conservative about /r/Coontown.
Most conservatives and most right-wingers don't fall foul of Reddit's policies. It's only the manbaby broflakes who get shitcanned. You can't reason with them because there's no reasoning with stupid. Ban their thread, ignore their tantrums, and get on with your life.
And the fucking idiots are just mad because the only people who use voat are other lowlife fuckwads. Now they can't "shock" the relatively normal people with their stupidity. I guess it sucks to be surrounded by like-minded fuckwads.
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.
Study finds limiting free speech successfully stifles the spread of ideas... to some degree.
Wake me up when September ends.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I'd be annoyed because Slashdot's ToS doesn't ban conservative hate, not that I actually hate conservatives as a group.
On the other hand, if I started /r/coontown I'd pretty much expect it to get banned. If I was serious about running such a discussion forum I'd try Voat or 8chan.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
... 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.
Shame neither of you actually read TFA. They did actually look on other sites, particularly Voat since that's where people said they would go, and found a lot of identical usernames with similar use of racist language on similarly names sub-boards.
That's why they concluded that the ban worked for Reddit, and pushed the people affected to Voat which is, as you might expect, a complete cess-pit.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
Eternal. It never ends.
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.
Only because it's too cold to go outside. If you had a Texas, you'd be exploding, too.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
And don't forget - once we've gotten used to banning "hate speech" it's trivial to shift one step over and start banning "unpatriotic speech".
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
For the most part, at the current time, you are correct, and that makes me pretty sad. A long time ago there was a time when trolling was a real art, and some really deep and amazing things were created. Great works of trolling were undertaken which took hours or even days to construct. Glaringly obvious "trolling" like what is so common today wasn't common, and instead really, really subtle and thoughtful trolls were more of the norm.
Only now we have lost that art, lost the storied tradition of someone trolling and 3/4 of the people not getting that they are trolling. That makes me sad, and I weep for all that we have lost.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
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 *
Dicking A Manboy Now.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Not liking something doesn't make it tyranny. Besides do you know what people like even less than being told what to do? Assholes!
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
yes it is.
Nothing shows the alt-right for the whining little snowflakes quite like demonstrating they are whining little snowflakes