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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.
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.
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.
I tried some clever trolling, but got modded +Insightful instead. Very frustrating.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.