SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Researchers propose a new approach for dismantling online hate networks
How do you get rid of hate speech on social platforms? Until now, companies have generally tried two approaches. One is to ban individual users who are caught posting abuse; the other is to ban the large pages and groups where people who practice hate speech organize and promote their noxious views.
But what if this approach is counterproductive? That's the argument in an intriguing new paper out today in Nature from Neil Johnson, a professor of physics at George Washington University, and researchers at GW and the University of Miami. The paper, "Hidden resilience and adaptive dynamics of the global online hate ecology," explores how hate groups organize on Facebook and Russian social network VKontakte — and how they resurrect themselves after platforms ban them.
As Noemi Derzsy writes in her summary in Nature:
Johnson et al. show that online hate groups are organized in highly resilient clusters. The users in these clusters are not geographically localized, but are globally interconnected by 'highways' that facilitate the spread of online hate across different countries, continents and languages. When these clusters are attacked — for example, when hate groups are removed by social-media platform administrators (Fig. 1) — the clusters rapidly rewire and repair themselves, and strong bonds are made between clusters, formed by users shared between them, analogous to covalent chemical bonds. In some cases, two or more small clusters can even merge to form a large cluster, in a process the authors liken to the fusion of two atomic nuclei. Using their mathematical model, the authors demonstrated that banning hate content on a single platform aggravates online hate ecosystems and promotes the creation of clusters that are not detectable by platform policing (which the authors call 'dark pools'), where hate content can thrive unchecked.
[...] The researchers advocate a four-step approach to reduce the influence of hate networks.
- Identify smaller, more isolated clusters of hate speech and ban those users instead.
- Instead of wiping out entire small clusters, ban small samples from each cluster at random. This would theoretically weaken the cluster over time without inflaming the entire hive.
- Recruit users opposed to hate speech to engage with members of the larger hate clusters directly. (The authors explain: "In our data, some white supremacists call for a unified Europe under a Hitler-like regime, and others oppose a united Europe. Similar in-fighting exists between hate-clusters of the KKK movement. Adding a third population in a pre-engineered format then allows the hate-cluster extinction time to be manipulated globally.)
- Identify hate groups with competing views and pit them against one another, in an effort to sow doubt in the minds of participants.
Hidden resilience and adaptive dynamics of the global online hate ecology[$], Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1494-7)
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday August 27 2019, @04:44PM (7 children)
Maybe the "undesirable" ideas spread, even against massive censorship, because they are better ideas? Once you allow that thought into your mind, not only does this whole debate make a lot more sense, it is the first step into a bigger world. Come, become a dissident, we are the counter culture now.
(Score: 2) by Mer on Tuesday August 27 2019, @04:59PM
No, that's why it's tiresome. If the undesirable ideas were bright I'd take arms and fight but it's not.
I'm not being a nihilist and wallowing in the idea that my opinion is the only one that's righ while both major camps are wrong.
I know there are others that share my views. I've met some in person, but only a handful and never online. Because just like major undesirable opinions they suffer from the gangrene on communication platforms.
Shut up!, he explained.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 27 2019, @05:04PM
"Come, become a dissident, we are the counter culture now."
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dream on, asswipe! You ain't some counter cultural iconoclast. Yours is a failed ideology which the rest of the world has cast onto the ash heap of history.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Tuesday August 27 2019, @06:40PM (3 children)
Better ideas for who?
Someone such as myself, whose political compass points to being libertarian left? Who tries to think for himself, and look at facts and evidence instead of sound bites, tweets, and propaganda? Who believes in personal responsibility, but also compassion for his fellow humans?
No. I refuse to subscribe to an idea where it is OK to cause harm to another human for the "sin" of being the wrong color, or the wrong religious belief, or their sexual orientation, or *fill in the blank*. My philosophy is that someone should be able to do whatever they want, as long as it harms no one else. The "ideas" of the so-called "counter-culture" are incompatible with my philosophy. These "ideas" advocate that it is OK to be an asshole, and I cannot agree to that.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 27 2019, @08:00PM
>> Who tries to think for himself, and look at facts and evidence instead of sound bites, tweets, and propaganda?
You're already part of that counter-culture and you don't even know it. Did you really think they were trying to stamp out "racism"? The handful of white power types are just the test run.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 27 2019, @11:28PM (1 child)
Who believes in personal responsibility, but also compassion for his fellow humans?
At some point you grow weary of helping others and realize they do not want help. They want you to live their life for them at the expense of yours. I unfortunately have learned this lesson the hard way. :( It has made me very cynical. When they *finally* took my advice they are doing 10000% better. It only took about 10k of my wealth for them to realize it, and me cutting them off. I had to give them no choice in doing it the right way. They were going to bankrupt us all. They are not alone in the way they act.
Also keep in mind what you see on the TV, news websites, and newspapers is fake. All scripted. All of it. You can *buy* a full page ad in the NYT and put pretty much whatever you want there. There is a vacant empty field that the journalists must pull 24/7 news from. The corporations, charities, and political parties know this. Its 20 min to air and you have a gap in your line up the size of the titanic. You grab some drivel that sounds like news written by one of those groups and run it. Poof 'news'. There are hundreds of PR companies who do exactly this. In the US there used to be well over 3000 news organizations. There are 6-12 now. What you are seeing is a consolidation into an echo chamber. They use the techniques of Edward Bernays to bring you back for more. They push your emotional buttons and you feel good about it and let them.
See
http://www.americantable.org/2012/07/how-bacon-and-eggs-became-the-american-breakfast/ [americantable.org]
and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM8L7bdwVaA [youtube.com]
The last straw for me was one of the CNN anchors standing chest deep in a plugged up runoff ditch of water to tell me how bad the weather was. While his film crew stood on the road nice and dry. They are to the point they lie about the fucking weather where I can open a window and see they are wrong. Christ what is wrong with these people....
The current 'counter-culture' is the only ones calling out the BS on all of the lies. For that is what they do. Lie.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday August 28 2019, @01:57AM
It is now worse. They invent whole hurricanes now. The last one to "hit" Louisiana was a total fake. The "eye" went directly over my town. Wind never exceeded 25mph before or after the eye passed. Think I know why they did it even. A few years back a strong squall came ashore in South Louisiana, but it wasn't a named storm or anything so nobody had prepared, it was a total pooch screw. So this time, when another similar system was coming in they fudged the numbers and named it. With the memory of the previous event they COULD have just been honest and said this thing was going to be another major rainmaker, everybody should get prepared; but now they just go straight to lying. You could see it on the TV coverage, Weather Channel guy is there on the beach and it supposedly came ashore right on the edge of hurricane strength. Nothing but rain. No shots of stop signs flapping around, palm trees bending, nothing.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday August 28 2019, @01:46AM
Not necessarily. Remember, "survival of the fittest" merely means survival of those species that, at that moment in time and in that particular ecological milieu, were best equipped to reproduce and survive. This goes for memes/ideas as well.
Your fallacy is extrapolating this infinitely far into the future, assuming that the surrounding noetic milieu is not affected by the memes in it, their effects on their carriers, and other external forces. You also have an oddly r-type approach to this particular problem, which is strange coming from someone who professes a K-type mental state.
tl;dr: yes, "sticky" memes do best at first, and memes that tap into humans' animalistic, low-level, and tribal instincts do very well out of all those. But they're basically the insects of the noosphere; their dominance means you're just a bug, and their eventual failure is assured when more intelligent, K-type memes take hold.
Even more tl;dr: you're a loser in the long run, you just refuse to acknowledge it :)
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...