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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: 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....