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Study finds Reddit’s ban of its most toxic subreddits worked (2017)

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Re: Study finds Reddit’s ban of its most toxic subreddits worked (2017)

#81

Post by [deleted] »

posterboy wrote: post #74
Veen wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The influence works in both directions. If "bad people" are able to publish content that is easy to find on a platform used by millions, it's likely to be seen by people who would never have been exposed to or influenced by it otherwise. Personally, I'd be happy if easily-influenced people weren't exposed daily to Islamist propaganda and pedophillic imagery. If the price of that is those communities going underground…

Subreddits are not easy to find. WTF?

[deleted]

Re: Study finds Reddit’s ban of its most toxic subreddits worked (2017)

#82

Post by ben_w »

Interesting. I have wondered if the “iron law of prohibition” [1] applied to censorship as well as substances (my original context was the UK’s “extreme porn” prohibition, but the same question arises for non-sexual censorship). It looks like drugs and censorship are different, given the diminished behaviour by the same accounts on other subreddits.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition

Re: Study finds Reddit’s ban of its most toxic subreddits worked (2017)

#83

Post by wpietri »

joeyrideout wrote: post #25

An emergent ethical concern keeps bugging me in these situations. Of course, private companies reserve the right to refuse business and services to whomever they want. In a healthy society this is no problem. But if we slide towards a dystopian future where Big Tech is basically an oligarchy governing important chunks of society without due process and the democratic checks and balances we would expect from a governi…

It's still the Internet. Anybody can run and host software. Anybody can post a link to that.

I agree tech's concentration of power in a few large companies is a big problem. I just don't think it's a significant concern for freedom of speech. Hopefully we'll return to enforcing pro-competition laws vigorously.

Re: Study finds Reddit’s ban of its most toxic subreddits worked (2017)

#84

Post by luckylion »

pygy_ wrote: post #65

Collective response to those who claim that it pushed those users to other platforms: Only marginally. If you read the paper ( http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf ), you can see that ~20% of the users of the banned subreddits became inactive vs 10-15% in control communities. The difference for users that deleted their account is of the same magnitude. The users that stayed had a dramatic drop i…

> The users that stayed had a dramatic drop in hate speech.

Which might mean that they don't engage in hate speech as much, or that they do the hate speech thing on another platform and follow their normal hobbies on reddit.

Re: Study finds Reddit’s ban of its most toxic subreddits worked (2017)

#85

Post by toss1 »

luckylion wrote: post #76
toss1 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be overlooking at least two key findings. When the users moved to other Reddit groups, they did NOT exhibit the same level of hateful behavior. some of this was due to better moderation. This contradicts your view that they simply go away to deeper holes away from moderating influences, and supports your point that moderating influences do provide positive influence. The other key finding is that "bigotry…

> When the users moved to other Reddit groups, they did NOT exhibit the same level of hateful behavior. As the article suggests: it's likely they found an off-reddit outlet for the stuff they no longer were able to do on reddit and continued to use reddit for their other interests (well, they left reddit at higher rates, too). That is, if you want to make sure that Twitter's hate speech rules work and make "the world…

Actually, it specifically neither confirmed nor contradicted that assertion, as it was out of scope to track to other venues, or address the larger problem of the entire society.

But it DID show that providing cesspools does increase the behavior of swimming in cesspools, AND show that moderation has an effect.

Providing mainstream venues for anti-social behavior increases that behavior and harms society.

Sure, it may still exist at the fringes, but the further it is pushed off into the fringes, the greater the effort needs to be made to engage in the behavior. The dedicated haters will still make the effort, but the vast majority of lazy bigots will just drift along elsewhere, without enhancing & aggravating their bigotry.

Similar to smoking in the US, it hasn't been banned, just strongly discouraged in public, and it is now a fringe behavior.

Re: Study finds Reddit’s ban of its most toxic subreddits worked (2017)

#86

Post by 9HZZRfNlpR »

p49k wrote: post #27
intertextuality wrote: post #3

Reddit back in the day: bans /r/fatpeoplehate, /r/coontown, /r/jailbait, and other awful subreddits. Reddit today: effectively bans (quarantines) /r/waterniggas simply because of the subreddit's title. It was quite literally a joke subreddit about being hydrated. Doesn't ban subreddits like /r/hapas. Edit: The problem with reddit is that it's wildly inconsistent about banning subreddits. Insane subreddits can exist f…

It was a disingenuous excuse for people to use a racial slur anytime someone mentioned the word “water” to the point where it appeared almost any time someone used the word in any context for any reason. It’s ridiculous how many people can’t control themselves when they think they have a thin excuse to cover their terrible behavior.

I'm not American but I've been told the word nigga is not the n word. Do I have a wrong impression about it?

I'm surprised a bit because the mainstream music is filled with the word nigga but also the n word. Isn't it workings against the idea of not using these words?

Re: Study finds Reddit’s ban of its most toxic subreddits worked (2017)

#87

Post by wpietri »

intertextuality wrote: post #17
antihero wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it turns out that yes, voat and gab.ai are both filled with the utter dregs of society. Is this "free speech" positive hangout a wonderful paradise full of intellectuals and idealists? No, just a bunch of racist conspiracy nut trash.

Exactly. I don't support voat or gab. I was just describing what happened. The problem with reddit is that it's wildly inconsistent about banning subreddits. Subreddits like these can exist for years, but only will get banned once they start to become popular enough that they start to get noticed.

That sounds perfectly consistent to me. Stuff that doesn't matter gets ignored. Stuff that does gets the attention of staff, who then apply rules.

It also sounds reasonable to me. At small scales, especially with novices, it's good to let people experiment, find their voices, build the right audience. But once something's of a certain size, it's unlikely to change its character much.

Re: Study finds Reddit’s ban of its most toxic subreddits worked (2017)

#88

Post by colordrops »

sethammons wrote: post #62
sagichmal wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It "worked" only if the definition is "it removed it from Reddit". As the article mentions, these people did not just disappear or change their mind. They just moved to more obscure places, where they can continue and be evem more motivated, because now they have been censored. What about all of the new people who would have more easily stumbled into those cesspools, but now have to take quite a bit more effort, an…

> the disease requires treating them things at a lower level I feel that the anti-vaccine movement had such a large resurgence because they had very public platforms. So, yeah, I agree with you.

So you are suggesting any discussion about the merits of vaccination should be forcefully stifled. That's a pretty low bar and opens up the shaping of public discourse on countless topics because they are "dangerous".

Re: Study finds Reddit’s ban of its most toxic subreddits worked (2017)

#89

Post by eeeeeeeeeeeee »

chobeat wrote: post #5

They are only moving to other platforms that are harder to track, like Discord or Telegram. Just because they don't appear in the data doesn't mean that they don't exist. Then yes, you sanitize some platforms but the problem as a whole is just less evident but still growing.

Nobody is actually saying we are going to eradicate these ideas completely.

Seems like a lot of comments here don’t want to do anything because it won’t completely eliminate the idea.

I don’t expect these ideas will ever be eradicated but my issue has always been that these platforms, especially Twitter and Reddit and especially YouTube, present these “underground” ideas alongside “mainstream” ideas and amplify it and suggest it to people that otherwise would have never stumbled upon it. And they present to the user as content of equal quality to ideas that are actually based in science and real research, not manipulation and cherry picked data.

The internet has plenty of space for everyone, but we don’t need to raise bad ideas to the same table as good ones. Just as we shouldn’t be covering “intelligent design” alongside evolution to our kids as an equal alternative.

Re: Study finds Reddit’s ban of its most toxic subreddits worked (2017)

#90

Post by Sharlin »

luckylion wrote: post #76
toss1 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be overlooking at least two key findings. When the users moved to other Reddit groups, they did NOT exhibit the same level of hateful behavior. some of this was due to better moderation. This contradicts your view that they simply go away to deeper holes away from moderating influences, and supports your point that moderating influences do provide positive influence. The other key finding is that "bigotry…

> When the users moved to other Reddit groups, they did NOT exhibit the same level of hateful behavior. As the article suggests: it's likely they found an off-reddit outlet for the stuff they no longer were able to do on reddit and continued to use reddit for their other interests (well, they left reddit at higher rates, too). That is, if you want to make sure that Twitter's hate speech rules work and make "the world…

Some probably did. But I wager many didn’t bother and only partook in the bigotry as long as it was easy. In other words, they were ”casual” bigots. Enablers, not instigators. The social dynamics of bullying and related antisocial behavior are fairly well understood.
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