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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: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday November 18 2021, @08:46PM (1 child)
I responded to a post that posited the choice was between the mainstream media and a babbling village idiot, meaning, that there is no other possible credible source. I said, not so, there are other credible choices. Elsewhere in the thread a couple of times I listed Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi as examples; they are doing what news organizations used to do, which is to do their research, investigate, and ask questions that make the rich and powerful and complacent uncomfortable.
So what you are pointing out is actually something I didn't say, which is to believe the "babbling village idiot." Your construction is binary, Media OR babbling village idiot, and my claim is that there are more than two choices, and some of those choices are better than either of the choices in your construction.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday November 18 2021, @09:11PM
Actually, I made no claim that there were only two sources, just that some alternatives are as bad or worse than the mainstream. My comment was that much of the name-calling and "toxic" comments are directed at those who choose the village idiot as their alternative source simply because he is saying things that oppose the mainstream and that the nature of those comments likely reflects extreme frustration.
My construction was open and contrasted two of many options.
Sometimes the correct source is the little boy laughing at the Emperor for parading about naked.