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: 0, Troll) by khallow on Tuesday August 27 2019, @04:56PM (4 children)
Who would these people be? Muslims?
Then what do you propose to do to stop allowing them to continue to exist? What's the final solution to this problem?
(Score: 2, Troll) by ikanreed on Tuesday August 27 2019, @05:33PM
It's pretty clearly shut down venues where they're allowed to engineer propoganda, and their institutions that reinforce it. These aren't terribly hidden. Arrest a few Ben Shapiros for incitement, get a few more people to say "Shut the fuck up KLM" here, it's not a hard problem.
And letting a few antifa weirdos sock nazis in the face when they show themselves in public without swooning about free speech. Getting the right to stop being nazi-enabling psychos is all it would take.
(Score: 5, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday August 27 2019, @05:41PM (2 children)
All of the extremist killings in the US in 2018 had links to right-wing extremism, according to new report [businessinsider.com]
FBI struggles to confront right-wing terrorism [latimes.com]
After El Paso, right-wing terrorists have killed more people on U.S. soil than jihadis have since 9/11. [slate.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 27 2019, @07:01PM
From your link: according to a January 2019 report from the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism.
By their definition of right-wing extremism. Not an exactly impartial source. This is akin to Ikanreed claiming anyone who disagrees with him is a Nazi.
This article provides zero statistics, only a few anecdotes and pearl clutching.
Total bullshit article from Slate. They arbitrarily choose to ignore 9/11 to skew the statistics and even admit that if they had chosen the cutoff at 2016 - The year Trump was elected - Muslims win. Don't try to sprinkle bullshit around and call it logic and reasoning.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 27 2019, @07:36PM
The ADL (Anti-Defamation League) story you linked above talks up right wing extremism. It's free propaganda for that whole movement even though it's just a mere 50+ deaths from a few crazies (less than lightning strikes) which incidentally makes it the fourth worst year on record (indicating strongly the minor nature of the problem). Should we shut down the venue/institution where such propaganda is engineered (that is, the ADL) as Ikanreed proposes? Or is it just fine to boost right wing extremist terrorism as long as your motives are excusable enough?
I think a large part of the problem here is that law enforcement has only so much ideological bandwidth. It should be concerning itself with things like mass killings not things like mass killings by particular ideological ecosystems. The latter means it has less resources available to deal with the overall problem, because it is obsessing over a subset of the problem for reasons having little to do with making things better.
Here, what makes it worse is that there's no real identifiable group for law enforcement to target to reduce such killings. It's a bunch of lone wolves who vaguely have some similar beliefs and life situations. So there's this huge call to action with no real action to do.