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from the can't-we-all-just-get-along? dept.
From a recent Science Reports paper:
Online debates are often characterised by extreme polarisation and heated discussions among users. The presence of hate speech online is becoming increasingly problematic, making necessary the development of appropriate countermeasures. In this work, we perform hate speech detection on a corpus of more than one million comments on YouTube videos through a machine learning model, trained and fine-tuned on a large set of hand-annotated data.
Our analysis shows that there is no evidence of the presence of "pure haters", meant as active users posting exclusively hateful comments. Moreover, coherently with the echo chamber hypothesis, we find that users skewed towards one of the two categories of video channels (questionable, reliable) are more prone to use inappropriate, violent, or hateful language within their opponents' community.
Interestingly, users loyal to reliable sources use on average a more toxic language than their counterpart. Finally, we find that the overall toxicity of the discussion increases with its length, measured both in terms of the number of comments and time. Our results show that, coherently with Godwin's law, online debates tend to degenerate towards increasingly toxic exchanges of views.
Journal Reference:
M. Cinelli, A. Pelicon, I. Mozetič, et al. Dynamics of online hate and misinformation. [open] Sci Rep 11, 22083 (2021).
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-01487-w
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ilPapa on Thursday November 18 2021, @04:59AM (6 children)
Those three things are mutually exclusive and they are not equal. Society used to shun people who acted like the internet trash are acting today. If we got back to that conservative principle, there would be no need to curtail liberty or censor speech.
The problem is, the people who used to do the shunning have found that joining in with hate speech, disinformation, and other antisocial hobbies of the far right feels good and makes degenerates famous, so they simply join in because they're afraid all that hate will be directed toward them. So instead of being rightly chastened, they are celebrated with anonymous "likes" which satisfy their basest desires for approval and acceptance. Once that feedback loop starts, they could no more stop being bad actors than a heroin addict can stop wanting dope.
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 18 2021, @08:09AM (1 child)
Citations needed for any of that. And, no, CNN is not a citation. Some serious studies, from somewhere other than a liberal non-profit "think" tank. I can wait . . .
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 18 2021, @08:18AM
OK, this just in from Satan's ThinkTank, Inc., Turns out everything you thought was true, and wanted to have confirmed by, um, somebody, is actually true. The citation is given. Truth is in. Trust in the Plan. Where we go to hell, we all go the hell. Semper Ignis!
(Score: 5, Informative) by epitaxial on Thursday November 18 2021, @01:50PM (2 children)
Actual conservatives would agree that a company that makes employees wear masks is free to do so. You aren't required to be employed by them so find employment elsewhere if you don't like it. Nope instead they make a law saying a company isn't allowed to do that.
Modern day conservatives make Ronald Reagan look like a leftist.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 18 2021, @05:00PM (1 child)
Now there's your problem. The term "conservative" has been used to describe just about every political position imaginable, from pro-serfdom, to pro-slavery, to pro-monarchy. Just about the only consistent thread in conservatism is the belief that would-be reformers should shut up and go home, so that everybody can go back to business as usual.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 19 2021, @04:52PM
You missed pro-colonialism.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 18 2021, @03:23PM
> Society used to shun people who acted like the internet trash are acting today.
Well it's not even a debate. One side is looking at facts (or close to) while the other is spouting off about space lasers run by The Jews. Uh OK, you win.