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posted by chromas on Tuesday August 27 2019, @02:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the internet-hate-machine dept.

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.

  1. Identify smaller, more isolated clusters of hate speech and ban those users instead.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.)
  4. 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)


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 27 2019, @05:17PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 27 2019, @05:17PM (#886217)

    If the backbone is anonymous onion routing like Tor, then nobody needs to know that you have accessed certain images. Then you can use a client-side filter to detect nudes and block them. You can also filter text based on keywords.

    The important part is that it should be impossible to shut down and unlikely to incriminate users.

  • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday August 27 2019, @05:28PM (1 child)

    by jmorris (4844) on Tuesday August 27 2019, @05:28PM (#886234)

    A decentralized network requires every participant to host some or all of the content. Hosting CP gets you vanned.

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 27 2019, @05:43PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 27 2019, @05:43PM (#886248)

      Maybe. Are Freenet users getting vanned? Can we encrypt the pieces?

      Instead of making communications retrievable, you could tap into a stream of communications that stops when you exit the software. It could look like the live view of Twitter for a keyword search. You store what you see in memory, then choose to save it or discard it based on settings. That would make it bad for archiving knowledge or having threaded conversations, but less likely to incriminate.