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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, @11:28PM (1 child)
Who believes in personal responsibility, but also compassion for his fellow humans?
At some point you grow weary of helping others and realize they do not want help. They want you to live their life for them at the expense of yours. I unfortunately have learned this lesson the hard way. :( It has made me very cynical. When they *finally* took my advice they are doing 10000% better. It only took about 10k of my wealth for them to realize it, and me cutting them off. I had to give them no choice in doing it the right way. They were going to bankrupt us all. They are not alone in the way they act.
Also keep in mind what you see on the TV, news websites, and newspapers is fake. All scripted. All of it. You can *buy* a full page ad in the NYT and put pretty much whatever you want there. There is a vacant empty field that the journalists must pull 24/7 news from. The corporations, charities, and political parties know this. Its 20 min to air and you have a gap in your line up the size of the titanic. You grab some drivel that sounds like news written by one of those groups and run it. Poof 'news'. There are hundreds of PR companies who do exactly this. In the US there used to be well over 3000 news organizations. There are 6-12 now. What you are seeing is a consolidation into an echo chamber. They use the techniques of Edward Bernays to bring you back for more. They push your emotional buttons and you feel good about it and let them.
See
http://www.americantable.org/2012/07/how-bacon-and-eggs-became-the-american-breakfast/ [americantable.org]
and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM8L7bdwVaA [youtube.com]
The last straw for me was one of the CNN anchors standing chest deep in a plugged up runoff ditch of water to tell me how bad the weather was. While his film crew stood on the road nice and dry. They are to the point they lie about the fucking weather where I can open a window and see they are wrong. Christ what is wrong with these people....
The current 'counter-culture' is the only ones calling out the BS on all of the lies. For that is what they do. Lie.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday August 28 2019, @01:57AM
It is now worse. They invent whole hurricanes now. The last one to "hit" Louisiana was a total fake. The "eye" went directly over my town. Wind never exceeded 25mph before or after the eye passed. Think I know why they did it even. A few years back a strong squall came ashore in South Louisiana, but it wasn't a named storm or anything so nobody had prepared, it was a total pooch screw. So this time, when another similar system was coming in they fudged the numbers and named it. With the memory of the previous event they COULD have just been honest and said this thing was going to be another major rainmaker, everybody should get prepared; but now they just go straight to lying. You could see it on the TV coverage, Weather Channel guy is there on the beach and it supposedly came ashore right on the edge of hurricane strength. Nothing but rain. No shots of stop signs flapping around, palm trees bending, nothing.