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.
Coontown was banned because of the speech it contained, not because of what our users did. Reddit's CEOs Steve Huffman and Ellen Pao both admitted this.
The Board of Directors pushed for the banning, spez complied.
Reddit is a left-wing propaganda mill, they hire employees specifically to promote social justice (this has been admitted too!), and they also banned my subreddit /r/alternativeright simply because they didn't want to give /r/altright 's userbase to me. My sub didn't have any doxing info on it.
You have a right to free speech, but nobody owes you a soapbox.
Its more like common decency.
You know how your parents eventually taught you not to shit all over the house? It is essentially the same thing. My cousin works in a day care and has the unfortunate job of doing this kind of training when the (wealthy, in theory well educated) parents fail to do so.
I suspect this will be much the same but much older children will have to be educated.
Who are the spoiled children again? The ones who demand free speech or the ones who bitch when it is used to say things they don't like?
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?
Reddit, or any other website, is under no legal or moral obligation to treat both sides equally. They built the soapbox. They own the soapbox. They can give it to or take it from whomever they please.
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
I tried some clever trolling, but got modded +Insightful instead. Very frustrating.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
> You need to stop and think about what free speech actually means. Your beloved First Amendment, that only applies to the government curtailing your speech.
It's a principle that is valued as the cornerstone of democracy.
You are attempting to use a "legalistic" argument to pretty much completely ignore a principle. You want to pretend that free speech is only defined by a single bit of law. You are eager to demonstrate WHY that law exists.
If not for that law, people JUST LIKE YOU would use the government to do bad things.
The Bill of Rights is not a comprehensive list of human rights. It's merely a set of limits placed on the federal government.
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.