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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: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday August 27 2019, @05:07PM (6 children)
Hitler arranged the imprisonment and murder of millions of people, most without any hint evidence that they committed any crime. We know why these people were rounded up and murdered because the Nazis meticulously kept track of it. Grounds for being killed included having any kind of physical or mental disability, being gay or lesbian, being Polish or Roma or Jewish, or being politically opposed to the Nazis.
Those who knew Hitler were well aware that he had a penchant for angry outbursts and occasional violence towards people around him. His targets included people who he had formerly considered allies, if they were opposing his plans for any reason at all, including impracticality.
None of the proposals listed above as methods to combat fascism include "round everyone up suspected of being fascist and murder them", which means that there's no possible way that the people you're referring to hate as intensely as Hitler did. That leaves two possibilities:
1. Either you genuinely deny the existence of the Holocaust in the face of mountains of photographs, several videos, tens of thousands of eyewitness testimonies including some from people still alive today, extensive documentation discovered during the war, and a German admission of guilt after the war, or
2. You are lying, and you're lying because you are trying to "hide your power level", as fascists are instructed to do. If you were to say what you really believe, it would probably be something about how all hierarchies are natural, the people on top of the hierarchy are in charge because they're superior to other people and we should get rid of any silly notions about equality and instead create a society either entirely made up of these superior people (by purging the inferior) or keeping some of the inferior population around as slave labor for the superior people to rule over as they saw fit. And you would at some point add in, quietly, the fact that key qualifications for being "superior" include being white, male, cisgender, heterosexual, and possibly Christian, and anyone who disagreed with you was just trying to set up a different hierarchy where the white cisgender heterosexual Christian men were now all enslaved to brown transgender lesbian overlords.
That's because they've been demonstrably false for a very very long time. For instance, the fascist understandings of race and gender bear no resemblance at all to actual genetics. The ideas in question continue to be popular among certain populations not because they're true or even undecided, but because some people would like to boss other people around but have no qualifications for doing so other than being born a particular way.
I don't put much effort into engaging in the ideas of Jeffrey Dahmer either. Just because an idea exists doesn't mean it's worth my time.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 27 2019, @05:17PM (3 children)
"Hitler arranged the imprisonment and murder of millions of people, most without any hint evidence that they committed any crime."
now, evolution does not exist...
he just spawned, and suddenly without reason "arrenged" the murder of millions..
in one of the worlds most develoed nation, germany...
nobody understands anything, but it is evident, military type of people just spawn and randomly murder the little people...
this must be investigated...
ah, yes, it cant be investigated, cuz it cant be questioned...
-zug
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday August 27 2019, @06:42PM (2 children)
It's irrelevant why Hitler did what he did to the question of whether Hitler hated people more or less intensely than those who are trying to reduce Nazi comments on online forums: Killing 10 million people is a more hateful act than refusing to invite somebody to your barbecue, and online forum censorship is more like refusing to invite somebody to your barbecue than killing them.
But, for the record, Hitler did what he did because he believed more-or-less the same thing I described above when laying out what fascists actually believe. He was not alone in those beliefs, far from it, which is why he gained the power necessary to murder that many people. And there are people on this very forum who also believe the same thing but are pretending not to because they want to recruit people into their movement and know not to state flat-out what it is that they want.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 27 2019, @09:11PM
ehm, no.
you do not seem to know or understand a number of things that can happen in an "old" place with a main and some minor etnicities.
also, by your way of expressing yourself, i get the feeling that you are a woman, in wich case your mind is made not to understand, but tu believe and survive.
in these intellectual times it is fashion to advertise the existence of evolution, but few understands what it actually means.
by and large, you are wrong.
-zug
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 27 2019, @09:26PM
One way of pointing out the idiocy your type of people seem so suffer from is this:
You do not seem to take note of the fact that in WW2 and all others during history, a lot of selfaware and more or less educated and capable men killed each other.
The only thing that bothers your kind is that some jews and gypsies and mentally ill people died.
You do not even notice all the other things that went on.
Do you see a problem with your mental processes or not?
Lemme try to get your attention:
MORE IS GOING ON HERE, U DUMB FUCK!!11!!!!
meh, its not worth it...
-zug
PS:
omg omg omg omg poor gipsys and mentally ill omg omg im fukking weeping myself to death....
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 27 2019, @09:52PM
The key wasn't the strength of his hate or the violence of his actions, but the power at his disposal.
Yet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 27 2019, @10:55PM
If you spend more time insulting people perhaps they will eventually think just like you?
Eventually they just roll their eyes and tell you to f-off. Lots of people are at that point. It is the correct way to deal with the narcissism and gaslighting you inflict onto everyone around you.
Nazis were socialists who discouraged any sort of 'wrong think'. You would just disappear one night after a visit from the guard. AntiFA is just the communist group who did not think the Nazis went far enough. They use the same tactics of terror and silence and eventually transformed themselves into the red guard.
That's because they've been demonstrably false for a very very long time.
Oh? prove it. What are these magical 'ideas' you made up that others hold that are demonstrably false?
And you would at some point add in, quietly, the fact that key qualifications for being "superior" include being white, male, cisgender, heterosexual, and possibly Christian, and anyone who disagreed with you was just trying to set up a different hierarchy where the white cisgender heterosexual Christian men were now all enslaved to brown transgender lesbian overlords.
And there it is. You prove your real true colors there as the real racist bigot. You see yourself as some sort of savior that is going to lift the others up out of their squalor. Every time. Want to see a real racist? Look in the mirror.
I don't put much effort into engaging in the ideas of Jeffrey Dahmer either. Just because an idea exists doesn't mean it's worth my time
And close minded at that! Without learning other points of view how do you know yours is right? Or did you just 'decide it'? I read many 'liberal' ideals. They are all rooted in poorly thought out ideas that sound nice. But in practice absolutely destroy the lives around them. If you are up to learning something 'new' try this perspective on for size. https://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/ [steshaw.org]
The methods proposed are little more than narcissist tactics of gaslighting and shuning. When applied evenly would just piss everyone off. But that is not the proposal is it? It is to target a group of 'wrong think' and destroy it. What happens when everything you just wrote is wrong think? Think it could not happen? Look no further than the USSR. Which was full on communism/socialism applied. Wrong think? Shipped off to the gulag or a few weeks explaining it to some sadists in a cellar. Not one of that group would call themselves conservative.