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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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.