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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) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 27 2019, @10:18PM (5 children)
*sigh*
Once more, for the idiots in the cheap seats, the "Paradox of tolerance" isn't a cute way of saying that you're super-smart therefore there should be censorship. It was a problem raised by Popper in a certain context, and if you read the whole text it actually doesn't say what you think it says.
If you actually read the paragraph in question, it starts with an unfounded presumption. If you accept a later elaboration and restatement, there are important conditions attached that do not really apply in the USA, let alone the whole world.
The unfounded presumption: "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance."
Really? Must it always? Under all conditions? Inevitably? Without exception? Reasonable people might well disagree.
Let's review the elaboration: "If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."
As the spartans said to the macedonians: "If."
A society founded on civil liberties and the defence thereof already inhibits the activities of the intolerant. If the intolerant are already so numerous, coordinated and well-armed as to force their will on everyone else, then it's outside the scope of the question of tolerance, so that's an irrelevant case (and doesn't obtain presently in the US anyhow). However, if you have civil liberties enshrined and defended, then you're precisely in the position that he seeks to exclude. In other words, the much-vaunted paradox has no bearing on the modern US of A.
He continues with: "In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies ; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise." Bingo! Tadaa! This is very much like what the US has going on right now. You don't have to like black people, or white people, or any people. Your not liking them doesn't entitle you to abuse them, nor them to abuse you.
His following proposals, making outlaws of the intolerant, are not feasible precisely in an environment of enforced civil liberties.
So here's the corollary: the paradox of tolerance only applies where the system would afford the intolerant the powers that the tolerant would use against them.
So if you live in a parliamentary system without a constitution enshrining civil liberties, maybe you should outlaw and gun down all your nazis. You'll look like such a shining example of humane tolerance! On the other hand, it's quite inappropriate in the US and you'd probably find yourself explaining your behaviour to a judge - assuming you survived your little rampage.
This sort of ignorant bullshit is why I wish philosophy were a required subject through K12.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday August 28 2019, @01:50AM (4 children)
Once more: the PoT is a specific example of a more generalized logical fallacy, the fallacy of the stolen concept, wherein someone uses a concept to argue against its genetic roots. This is something, again, like standing on a tree branch and sawing off the branch you're standing on where it meets the trunk, with predictably and similarly Wile E Coyote-ish results.
"If you don't tolerate my intolerance you're intolerant, you hypocrite!" is pretty much the Ur example. You fool no one, and this huge wall of text of yours is disingenuous horseshit. I, too, wish philosophy and logic were in public school curricula, so that no adult would ever make such a stupid fucking argument. Good *day* sir.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 30 2019, @04:28AM (3 children)
So what's your counterpoint? That intolerance is somehow tolerance?
As others have pointed out elsewhere, it's not even a paradox, it's an observation that if you have a broken system in which the intolerant can seize power (e.g. Hitler in Weimar Germany) then giving the intolerant free rein would be unwise. The political scientist however points out that it means that, intolerance be damned, you have a broken system.
At best, Popper's observation motivates enshrining civil liberties, once you examine the implications.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday August 31 2019, @01:31AM (2 children)
Er, no, my point is that any idiot who thinks "Ha ha, by being intolerant of my intolerance you're a hypocrite!" is an actual argument is somewhere between "marzipan teapot" and "skiing down a mountain of broken glass" on the stupid-o-meter.
I suppose that the observation in question here is a *consequence* of the fact that allowing something based on a stolen-concept fallacy to go forward has bad real-world consequences is true? It's a few degrees of separation to go from this directly to enshrining civil liberties though, and I can think of more immediate arguments to do that.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 31 2019, @02:06AM (1 child)
Intolerance of intolerance isn't necessarily hypocrisy, unless one preaches tolerance as the result. Manifestly, by obvious counterexample, it's not. To pick on the old hippy slogan: Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity. Insert statements concerning tolerance ad libitum.
The question then simply is one of which books (and ultimate, saith the poet, people) one wishes to burn.
Those reactionary freaks who don't want to burn books are therefore tolerant of the intolerant, and the question that Popper then brings up is whether or not they're being reckless. Popper answers that by implication - what is the regime under which they live?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday August 31 2019, @02:21AM
You're missing the point again: tolerance and intolerance are like matter and antimatter. Mix them and the entire system annihilates itself. They are antitheses. You can't have both; like the matter/antimatter split, the only stable state of affairs is a predominance of one over the other to the point that the other exists in vanishingly small, sequestered amounts.
I know which one I'd rather see predominate.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...