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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: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 18 2021, @04:59PM (5 children)
Thing is... this only works so long as the noise doesn't swamp the signal. There comes a time when some folks should STFU for $DEITY's sake.
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/ Hush hush / Keep it down now / - 'Til Tuesday, Voices Carry
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 18 2021, @05:23PM (1 child)
Yes, only APPROVED speech should be allowed.
Someone told me about the First Amendment and free speech being one of the foundations of our country, but I had him reported. All the sources I choose to read tell me that isn't true.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 18 2021, @05:29PM
Excess of speech is a deadly poison.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday November 18 2021, @07:34PM (2 children)
Who decides what is the noise and what is the signal? It might, it probably is, be different for different folks. So you just land in another definition problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 18 2021, @08:57PM (1 child)
By definition, noise contains no information.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 18 2021, @10:17PM
That's an interesting point. What if we used the tools of censorship to tamp down the noise instead of targeting wrongthink? It would be informative to see the results if there was a platform that blocked all of the regurgitated talking points, memes, truisms and such but otherwise allowed all novel arguments and ideas.