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Source: Technology Review
A new study [PDF] suggests what we've suspected for years is right: YouTube is a pipeline for extremism and hate.
How do we know that? More than 330,000 videos on nearly 350 YouTube channels were analyzed and manually classified according to a system designed by the Anti-Defamation League. They were labeled as either media (or what we think of as factual news), "alt-lite" intellectual dark web, or alt-right.
[...] The alt-right is what's traditionally associated with white supremacy, pushing for a white ethnostate. Those who affiliate with the "intellectual dark web" justify white supremacy on the basis of eugenics and "race science." Members of the alt-lite purport to not support white supremacy, though they believe in conspiracy theories about "replacement" by minority groups.
[...] The study's authors hypothesized that the alt-lite and intellectual dark web often serve as a gateway to more extreme, far-right ideologies. So they tested that by tracing the authors of 72 million comments on about two million videos between May and July of last year. The results were worrying. More than 26% of people who commented on alt-lite videos tended to drift over to alt-right videos and subsequently comment there.
[...] The team, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, also found evidence that the overlap between alt-righters and others who dabble in intellectual dark web and alt-lite material is growing. The authors estimate that about 60,000 people who commented on alt-lite or intellectual dark web content got exposed to alt-right videos over a period of about 18 months. The work was presented at the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Barcelona this week.
In a statement, YouTube said it's working through these issues: "Over the past few years ... We changed our search and discovery algorithms to ensure more authoritative content is surfaced and labeled prominently in search results and recommendations and begun reducing recommendations of borderline content and videos that could misinform users in harmful ways."
A spokesperson added that YouTube disputes the methodology and that it doesn't take into account more recent updates to its hate speech policy or recommendations. "We strongly disagree with the methodology, data and, most importantly, the conclusions made in this new research," the spokesperson said.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday February 01 2020, @05:31AM (12 children)
People have also been shot and killed for the heinous crime of attending church or going to school multiple times in the last few years. A bunch were run down on the West Side bike path in Manhattan for the crime of walking. Others have been stabbed to death in London for the crime of walking on bridges.
Do we count those as hate crimes, too? Can we talk about the rising persecution of Christians in the West?
There's no need to build white enclaves in those places because they already are almost exclusively white. I really question your assertion of an "unusual number of hate crimes" there because there just aren't any minorities to target there. There are two Jews in Montana in Helena, and I know one of them. And it must be said that just because there are no minorities in those areas does not mean the people there are racist. They're not. The vast majority of them despise the handful of white supremacists who fester in their craziness in remote valleys.
The ADL and SPLC are full of shit when they assert white supremacy is on the rise. They gin up BS to keep the donations flowing.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday February 01 2020, @03:01PM (11 children)
"Rising persecution of Christians in the west?"
Yeah, it's awful. We've never had a Christian president, Christians can't practice their religion openly, there aren't any Christian groups like the Dominionists amassing power and money and government positions to remake the nation in their own theocratic interest...all these things aren't real. None of them are happening. Christians are persecuted.
You are a shit Christian. Persecution is part of the package according to Jesus. If you're in power and not being persecuted, you should ask yourself if you've actually taken up the Cross. Or, for that matter, if you're actually acting in Christian ways...you know, standing up to oppressive government and private entities, caring for poor people, things like that.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 01 2020, @07:23PM (1 child)
Zing and a win!!
Phoenix is co servative adjacent. Has swallowed some of the poison pills because the world is changing and change is scary. Sure there is a lot of anti-christian sentiment from the growing body of atheists who are tired of oppressive religions. As you point out this is not the same as oppression of christians.
Wake me up when the local zoo starts feeding the lions.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday February 07 2020, @12:15PM
I am a Christian atheist.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday February 01 2020, @08:24PM (8 children)
And the point went right over your head. It's OK. It's the weekend, and you're probably upset by the news on Friday.
Christians are the most persecuted in the world [huffpost.com]. You never read about that in the Western press, though, because it does not fit their narrative. In fact it surprised me when I read that article in the Huffington Post.
So my point was, again, that if we're going to fret about religious persecution shouldn't we also include everyone who is persecuted or killed for their religious beliefs, be they what they may? If people shooting up mosques means rising Islamophobia, and people shooting up synagogues means rising anti-Semitism, then wouldn't people shooting up churches mean rising anti-Christian terror?
Or is it just OK to slaughter Christians now because reasons?
I know, I know. Does it bruise your tribalism to suggest, however mildly, that white people, heterosexuals, men, and Christians are people, too? Is it that you just hate them, and want them all to die because they're bad? I mean, if you're going to cast aspersions on each others' motives, then surely what goes around will come around...
Finally, I don't think you really get what it is to be a Christian. Nor have you ever offered up any evidence to suggest that you are fit to judge the relative moral standing of others, least of all how "Christian" someone else is. I know you're a lesbian, and that you are intelligent--something I admire about you--, but you don't know me or how I live my life to be able to reasonably assess how true to my faith I am. That's a matter for the Almighty to decide.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday February 01 2020, @10:57PM (3 children)
You owe me an apology for 2/3 of this post, mostly for assuming I'm okay with slaughter of others for any reason like religion or ethnicity or skin color.
As to whether I'm fit to judge someone else's moral standing? Oh yes. Absolutely yes. In fact, if you subscribe to what is technically referred to as "Divine Command Theory," *you* are the one who is not fit to judge others morally, for the very good reason that DCT cannot and does not offer an ontological grounding for morality. I've spent almost 15 years informally studying logic, moral philosophy, apologetics, and counter-apologetics. Argue with me on these topics if you wish, but do not, DO NOT, take that high-handed approach with me. How dare you? If you have a shred of intellectual honesty you'll apologize for that too, and then if you want to, we can start from what it *means to be moral.*
As to who's shooting up worshipers in the United States, ask yourself something: are the people shooting up a given $PLACE_OF_WORSHIP of a different faith, or the same one? Note that, and I'm sure this is going to rustle your jimmies, I consider Catholics and Protestants the same faith, i.e., branches of Christianity, the same way Sunni and Shi'a are both branches of Islam. More distance there, in fact, than the difference between for example Orthodox and Conservative Judaism. What is the motive of the shooter? Because, newsflash, if the guy who shoots up a synagogue does it because "dem goddamn Heebs're controllin' the world!" and the guy who shoots up a church is just full of pent-up whiteboy angst, *the latter is not a religious hate crime.* Then too, the fact that Christianity is default in the US needs to be considered; these faiths do not exist in a vacuum, and neither does the flow of secular power around them.
Regarding how true to your faith you are, if you'd done the kind of research I had you might be very surprised indeed. Look up the Council of Nicaea, and do note this was all the way back in 325AD, for when the faith became irrevocably corrupted. And you can go right to the Bible itself and compare Paul to the Synoptic Gospels, or the Synoptics to John even, to discover quite a lot of theological disagreement within decades of Jesus' death, no synods or secular power required!
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday February 05 2020, @03:36AM (2 children)
Oh, OK. You're a theoretical moralist. Yes, yes, those who put shoes on their faith and actually go out and help people cannot hold a candle to a woman who slummed it for a couple semesters in Div school. Give me a fucking break. How dare you? You think that using words like "ontological" cow everybody into acknowledging your moral and intellectual supremacy? Perhaps it does in your set. But that makes me think less of you if that's the kind of company you keep. And you think that the only path to faith and morality is received faith? There is also achieved faith; that comes through a series of questions that can cross a threshhold but never really end.
So, no, I don't owe you a fucking apology. I owe you the same I owe everyone--wounds to your conceit. I owe you insults to your vanity. I owe you challenges to your truths. And I owe you the reflection that you flipped out across the nine dimensions and acted like an asshole because I pointed out that it's not just Jews who are killed for their beliefs.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday February 05 2020, @03:53AM
You completely misread me. Back off and take a breath. And if you think I never did anything concrete or real, you very clearly have not been reading my posts about the anti-human-trafficking work I did, nor the six people I saved from suicide (one of whom is now my girlfriend and has been since 2012!), not to mention the things I've never posted about because I never thought it was worth bragging or virtue-signalling about them.
Div school? What kind of bourgeois crap is that? I'm entirely self-taught! And if you think I taught myself those things for the sake of lording it over other people, that says a lot more about me than you. You have no idea about my upbringing, my religious history, the long dark night of the soul that impelled me to begin this search half a lifetime ago as it is, NONE OF IT! How dare I? No, how dare *you?!"
Come face me on equal ground. We will speak of morality, what it means to be moral, what the grounding of morality is and is not. If it helps you can think of me as another of those "series of questions that can cross a threshold" you spoke of. I know exactly what it feels like to be convinced of a religious position. And I know what it is to be completely devastated when my own research and questioning shows me how deluded I was. It sucked. It's painful. I'm still suffering from it. But I've come out of it one king hell mountain of a lot stronger, and better able to face all the horrible things that were done to me.
Are you brave enough, secure enough in your faith, to face me honestly using the tools of logic, reason, and discourse? I believe you are. I believe the real question is whether you will, and what your summum bonum really is...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday February 05 2020, @04:12AM
Christ almighty, I *cannot* let this just go with one reply! Do you have *any* idea of the things I've suffered to get to this point?! Any clue how much time I've spent homeless or frightened or displaced, how many times I've eaten out of trash cans and dumpsters, what I've suffered at the hands of family, employers, ostensible friends, how many people close to me I've seen suffer or die or simply disappear and never return?!
You've got your head so far up your ass you think anyone challenging you is some kind of smug, faithless, spoiled petit-bourgeois brat who's never had to deal with anything more troubling than what his or her next day's outfit was going to consist of. How completely, utterly solipsistic of you. That view keeps you trapped in your persecution complex and makes you see nothing but enemies on every side. You see the entire world through shit-colored glasses, as if it's made of people who are personally out to get you, yes you, Phoenix666, because they can't stand what a paragon of long-suffering virtue and faith and goodness and incorruptible pure pureness you are!
You, with your Greenpeace and Sierra Club activism, your Korean wife you deign to marry despite her being a Catholic heretic, your two beautiful interracial children, your desegregation efforts. You, the "good one." You, the shining example of How To Do White Straight Christian Middle Class Male The Right Way (TM), how *dare* all those people *assume* things about you? Don't they know that's discrimination? How would *they* like it if someone did that to them? How would *they* like it if your saintly patience snapped and you stopped being "the good one" and gave all those uppity ungrateful sons of bitches (and bitches) what they deserve for their ignorant backbiting!
Have I got the message across yet? You're suffering from Pride, a huge surfeit of it, the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins according to many Christian thinkers, the vice that impelled Lucifer to place himself above Yahweh in the mythology. You need to take a good, long, hard look at yourself.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday February 01 2020, @11:01PM (2 children)
Also, will you kindly tell me what the fuck my being a lesbian has to do with any of this? Was that a veiled threat, like "well my religion says people like you should die and will burn in hell for eternity anyway, but lookit meeeee, so tolerant, I'm condescending to talk to you like you're not just kindling" or what? Public masturbation is illegal, you know...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday February 05 2020, @03:09AM (1 child)
It has nothing to do with it. It's just one of two things I know about you. But it doesn't mean I know you or have any standing to judge the disposition of your soul. By the same token it's preposterous for you to appoint yourself the arbiter of my soul based on what you know from me here.
I would never consign you to hell or wish you death for being a lesbian or an atheist or anything of the sort, but it does rather sound like to you it's no big deal when Christians get killed for being Christians and we should just all stop talking about it and pretend like it doesn't happen, the way one does not speak of the shining wire in Cowslip's warren in Watership Down.
Do you castigate Jews and their beliefs the way you do Christians? I bet you don't. Do you belittle Muslims and their beliefs this way? I bet you don't.
You should ask yourself why that is.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday February 05 2020, @03:31AM
You...uh, haven't noticed me roundly blasting the Abrahamic religions as a whole, then? Do you even *read* my posts? I make it a point to use the phrase "Abrahamic religions" as it is, and very often mention Islam and Christianity as a pair of siblings for the very good reason that the underlying pathology is the same. I don't know as much about Judaism as about Islam or Christianity, but I *do* know enough to observe that there's much less theological distance between them than any of their partisans want to acknowledge!
And no, I *don't* think it's right for Christians to be killed for being Christians, and replace "Christians" with "followers of any other religion" and it still holds.
You now owe me *two* apologies, as you've launched an ignorant broadside which 10 or 20 minutes of going through my post history would have precluded.
Again: I've spent a decade and and a half, granted on an informal basis, studying everything from comparative ANE religion (which of necessity includes the Sumerian and Babylonian antecedents to Judaism) to moral philosophy to predicate logic to apologia/counter-apologia. You are not dealing with some ignorant, half-cocked atheist ranter here, not least because I'm not an atheist to begin with--actually, unlike you, I have a concept of God which is internally consistent and doesn't conflict with observable reality!
Besides which, the only reason *you personally* wouldn't "consign me to hell" for being a lesbian or whatever is because you believe you don't have to, that your demonic God will do it for you. Did you know that passage in Leviticus is only speaking about gay men, and doesn't mention us at all? Did you know the one in Romans 1:18-30 or thereabouts, says God *essentially made people gay (and a whole lot else) for not kissing up to him?*
You don't know your own source material, Phoenix, and it *shows.* Educate yourself. This petulant persecution complex is making you look much weaker and more ignorant than you probably are, and it's a bad look. Consider that unbelievers disbelieve not out of some perverse pride or stubborn unwillingness to bend the knee, but because we know your religion and your Scripture and the character of your God and its followers better than you do.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2, Troll) by aristarchus on Tuesday February 04 2020, @09:42AM
I think we need to bring back the Lions. It was a two-fer! Great entertainment for the Roman masses, distracting them from the corruption of Emperor Trump, and a really great opportunity for Christians to demonstrate their faith via martyrdom. Christians can only exist as a covert, prosecuted minority, otherwise they turn in to Republicans supporting decadent and corrupt rulers like Justinian and Trump. So let's bring back the Lions. Better than Super Bowl, I promise!