10 ms·

An experiment in fighting racism on Twitter

91 points by bootload 10y ago

jk563 10y ago
> "I used Twitter accounts I controlled (“bots,” although they aren’t acting autonomously) to send messages" It's a shame they over-hyped the title and made it all clickbaity. The post itself clearly states that they are not autonomous and therefore not programmed. Possibly not helped by the use of the word "bot" over and over. Am I right in saying "bot" implies autonomous? That aside, interesting short read with a fairly intuative result. Good to see it backed up with actual research. Though it doesn't mention how many accounts were targetted during the research. Is there potential a way of analysing messages for racism in the same way some do sentiment analysis? Is it the same sort of problem? Not even a beginner in the field, let alone an expert!
- rtpg 10y ago
  there's the small issue of the use-mention distinction, but generally I imagine it could work well. There are so many dog-whistles out there (especially for the alt-right) that the sort of overtly racist comments on Twitter would come out quickly. In Twitter's case, follower graphs would also probably be a good indicator, at least for people who follow less than 200 accounts. Not to mention that a lot of these people overtly say in their twitter bios that they're part of the frog police or whatever. Twitter could nuke Alt-right Twitter from orbit pretty easily. Then they'd just go run off and use some "actual free speech" twitter clone and fester in their own space. Just like they do when reddit/4chan cleans house.
  - astrobe_ 10y ago
    Populate those clone sites with troll-feeding bots for maximum efficiency.
  - jk563 10y ago
    I don't think banning (my assumption of your intention behind nuking) is the correct course of action. I just had a similar chain of thought at a story of a students union wanting to ban certain newspapers from the campus. My opinion is that, in that instance, the union should focus on the people who buy those newspapers. Why do they buy them? Do they agree with the messages? Or perhaps they are believing what they see without critical thought? There is then either an ideological debate or perhaps critical thinking education that can be undertaken. Hiding the message of an organisation or individual seems morally wrong to me. I'd much rather see the opinions published and shunned rather than outright censored. In the Twitter example, I'd like to see the classifications used to help understand the viewpoint of others or provide further information prior to posting, rather than to censor / ban individuals or groups. Not a fully formed idea, for which I apologise. My gut (and it is only my gut) tells me there is a useful aid there.
    - rtpg 10y ago
      I have a bit of trouble with these arguments, because the "free speech" argument feels really recent to me. At it's core, twitter is an assemblage of communities. Twitter can simply decide that, no, it doesn't want neo-nazis on its website. These people are then free to go make their own websites to hang out on. Websites like Digg or Something Awful, despite also not being about single topics, were never sitting around thinking "Oh, I want to ban this guy that goes around calling black people monkeys, but free speech". Even 4chan would ban people for that sort of dumb stuff. I feel like this argument only became prevalent after reddit became big. There is an argument to be made that reddit's philosophy on this point single-handedly made all "community" websites worse, because it stigmatized the notion of "drawing a line in the sand", and implied that all websites have to accept everyone. I think in the newspaper example, Twitter is a newspaper, not the campus. People can make new websites easily, just like they can make new newspapers. Twitter is under no obligation to "publish" stuff if they don't want to. The internet is the campus. No DNS blocking, just banning users from some websites. And, honestly, the amount of people who care about the "free speech" issue dwarfs the amount of people who see Twitter as "the place to get trolled at". It doesn't seem like good branding to be at the same level as 8chan on this point. Though, to your point, on a more general level, figuring out what's going on in the audience for these sorts of messages is important.
- krallja 10y ago
  It's especially sad, because the word "sock-puppet" already exactly describes the accounts the researcher used.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
contingencies 10y ago
Is there an ethical question regarding the computer-assisted manipulation people's perspectives, however ignorant and wrong they may be? I believe so. Personally I would not write this sort of software for this reason, and consider government investment in such software an affront to basic human rights - UN Article 13, Freedom of Expression: Freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media. I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Beatrice_Hall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Beatrice_Hall (commonly misattributed to Voltaire)
- whybroke 10y ago
  How is it remotely blocking someone's free speech or access to information when you politely and automatically tell them that the blatant racial slur they just used might offend someone?
  - guitarbill 10y ago
    One problem - and one that people often forget - is that historically, societies change their position on what's appropriate. It's also easy to see an automated approach leading to hilarious results with say tweets from African-American rappers. Finally, maybe we can move past this "might offend someone" stance that offers 0% nuance?
    - whybroke 10y ago
      It's a curious argument that says un-nuanced insults should be permitted but pointing them out as such should not. Or that in the past insults differed therefore we should ignore today's. Or that hypothetically something hilarious might happen so don't call out trolling harassment.
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    If a bot is used it's automated and you don't tell anyone anything.
rtpg 10y ago
There was a This American Life episode[1] where someone who was being harassed got contacted by the troll. The harassment was some pretty serious shit (making a twitter account of the victim's dead father, then insulting through this). But one day the attacker realized how awful the thing they did was, and ended up apologizing profusely to her. There was also that study about how people's views on gay marriage evolved substantially after just a couple conversations with a gay couple, who would say "Hey, why can't we get married?". Though there was some statistical issues with that IIRC.... I have a hard time saying "these are proof that yelling at trolls works" because there are good and bad ways of communicating the point, but it sure feels like direct confrontation works on some level. Though I don't know how well this stuff works against people from /pol/, if only because most of them don't actually care about the issues, just yelling at people. [1]: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/545/if-you-dont-have-anything-nice-to-say-say-it-in-all-caps https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/545/... (Act 1)
ivan_gammel 10y ago
Would be great to see more data from this research to understand the scale of the effect and quality of analysis. How long the measurements have been performed? Was there direct causal link between the tweet from bot and reduction of the number of racial slurs? Were there any other events that could influence the research, e.g. a hot topic that could consume most of the attention of the subjects? Was there reduction in the number of hate speech tweets at all or the subjects just switched to the milder language? How big is the effect in relative numbers?
varjag 10y ago
The findings are in a way depressing. Only the black bots with many followers cohort was any effective, probably due to intimidation effect on the offender.
- darkFunction 10y ago
  Did you read the same article?
- mintplant 10y ago
  Other way around, only the "white" bots with high follower counts were effective.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- inimino 10y ago
  You misread the article. Only the white bots were effective. The black bots with many followers had a negative effect, but only on a subset of the users. Based on the effect sizes and without more data these finding don't look terribly robust anyway.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
mibbiting 10y ago
"and I only included subjects who appeared to be a white man" Ah yes of course - racism can only be carried out by white men after all. What a pile of rubbish. If you take offense at words, things are going to get progressively worse for you as more and more automated bots enter the scene. The answer of course, is for people to stop taking offense. Do these people get offended at spam emails suggesting they need viagra or a fuckbuddy? What's the point?
- inimino 10y ago
  > racism can only be carried out by white men after all ...because he wanted to test the in-group out-group effect. Furthermore given the metric he was using... Honestly, did you even read the article?
  - Chris2048 10y ago
    Can you expand on "given the metric he was using"?
    - inimino 10y ago
      He measured use of a particular ethnic slur, the interpretation of which can vary depending on who is using it.
      - mibbiting 10y ago
        eg racism can only be performed by white people.
        Chris2048 10y ago
        Not so much that, as much as the only kind of racism being investigated was that of white people.
        mibbiting 10y ago
dkarapetyan 10y ago
Isn't it interesting that time and again every online forum with moderate affordances for anonymity quickly degrades into name calling and other generic abuse? Seems like the only way to combat this degradation is with heroic manual effort. Maybe there are automated ways around the problem but it's tricky balancing open discourse with automatic banning of abusive accounts since any kind of automated system will invariably stifle legitimate discussions. The word "nigger" when used in a discussion with the proper historical or even comedic context can be benign but I doubt any automated system will be able to make the distinction since that would require some kind of understanding of history and comedy. For example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOwjtNEoRYg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOwjtNEoRYg
- reitanqild 10y ago
  > Isn't it interesting that time and again every online forum with moderate affordances for anonymity quickly degrades into name calling and other generic abuse? Happens in systems with Full Real Name policies as well. IMO Full Real Name policies only deter people who 1. Have something to lose 2. Have a dissenting view 3. Does use a fake account with a Fake Real Name. I.e. IMO a Full Real Name policy alone just sets us up for an echo chamber situation.
- HenryTheHorse 10y ago
  Community moderation is no joke, but the gold standard for sustaining an incredibly civil, intelligent community is probably Metafilter. Then again, their size is tiny fraction of Twitter's or Reddit's.
  - pekk 10y ago
    Isn't this the problem, that some forums get too big to moderate?
aaron-lebo 10y ago
These findings are less than exciting: Comparing across the panels of Figure 4 shows the decay in the effect of Treatment C over time. Although the effect remains statistically significant, the coefficient decreases steadily. In Panel A, the point estimate of -.27 indicates that the daily rate of the use of the word “_” decreased by .27 more among subjects in Treatment condition C than among subjects in the control condition. This average treatment effect for condition C decreased in magnitude to -.17 in Panel B and -.11 in Panel C. I collected data for 2 months, but these results are not shown because none of the treatments are significant. ... Encouragingly, these effects persisted over time, for the first month under study, although not for two months. Also, the effect was significant at p < .05 in the two week time period, but it was only significant at p < .10 in the one week and one month time periods. Wow! The subjects cut back on their slurs for the next month (and what is the practical difference in .27 fewer daily slurs compared to the control group?)....and then they started doing it again. http://kmunger.github.io/pdfs/Twitter_harassment_final.pdf http://kmunger.github.io/pdfs/Twitter_harassment_final.pdf Can't help but wonder how you get a Washington Post article out of that. It's a good graduate-level semester paper. What connections does this guy have?
fdsaaf 10y ago
Is this Twitter that's fighting racism also the Twitter with this moderation policy? [nsfw] https://i.sli.mg/2V7OlX.jpg https://i.sli.mg/2V7OlX.jpg
danjc 10y ago
Did I miss it or is there no mention of sample size and average tweets/day/sampled user?
kutkloon7 10y ago
"I used a racial slur as the search term because I thought of it as the strongest evidence that a tweet might contain racist harassment. I restricted the sample to users who had a history of using offensive language, and I only included subjects who appeared to be a white man or who were anonymous." Right, because white men are the only people are the only ones who can be racist. If you have to rely on a criterion like this, that's a very good sign that the method you use is not objective. Besides that, I really like the reply the author chose, the message and its phrasing seem very effective, while staying respectful towards the tweeter.
- BigJeffeRonaldo 10y ago
  They were guilty of being white.
- cooper12 10y ago
  You're reading a lot into something they didn't even claim. They explain why they had to choose a specific race in the following paragraph: > It was essential to keep the race and gender of the subjects constant to test my central question: How would reactions to my sanctioning message change based on the race of the bot sending the message? Why they chose people who were white shouldn't really matter as their conclusion was not "white men are racists". It was just something that had to be kept constant and grouping on race is not something unfamiliar for researchers, especially since in this case the whole experiment was based on the races of the sender and receiver. (Also note that it's much easier to distinguish between black and white rather than if they made the profile pictures different shades on the Fitzpatrick Scale)
cs2818 10y ago
As a CS researcher who often assists researchers in sociology with Twitter studies I struggle with how accurate or meaningful the results are when the study depends on inferring too much about specific users. I have never conducted a study which involved actively intervening (and would like to know how IRB approval was obtained to do so), but the number of inferences which must be made are difficult enough when simply observing user activity. I would think running manipulation checks for the user's perception of the intervening profile would be nearly impossible. Ultimately what is most difficult about Twitter studies is that the data collected is rarely available for inspection by anyone other than the researcher collecting it. When so many subjective decisions must be made in analysis this is particularly troublesome.
motardo 10y ago
The sample size was 242. If you click the link to the paper, then click the supplementary material link, you get [this pdf](https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1007%2Fs11109-016-9373-5/MediaObjects/11109_2016_9373_MOESM1_ESM.pdf https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1007%2Fs111...) that explains the methods.
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
What has to kill the alt-right is sunlight: drag their ideas into public and point out how those are wrong. With a boot, if necessary. So for instance, no, race is not a biologically meaningful signifier.
- sctb 10y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12992743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12992743 and marked it off-topic.
hga 10y ago
Indeed you're correct, that sure worked wonders for President-Elect Hillary! (http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign/293359-full-speech-hillary-clinton-attacks-alt-right-and http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign/...) As for the "boot", I'll just note that in the US at least, it's us on the Right who own the guns. Good luck trying that; any particular reason the anti-Trump election rioters seem to be limiting themselves to Blue areas?
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  Ooooh, threatening to shoot leftists on Hacker News. Really edgy.
  - hga 10y ago
    Is an in implicit threat of self-defense an improper response to your all but explicit threat of mass physical violence? Coming from the side that throughout this campaign and after has been engaging in mass physical violence? If you want edgy, [censored by dang], but search way way back in my comment history if you insist.
    - sctb 10y ago
      > ...[censored by dang]... That isn't true or fair. All we've done is ask you not to use Hacker News to engage in political and ideological warfare, which is not what the site is for, and which we have to ask you again to please stop! The fact that this thread is not up to the standards of civility doesn't give us permission to make it worse.
      - hga 10y ago
        In other words, self-defense is doubleplusungood, in the discussions or in real life. Got it.
    - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
      >Coming from the side that throughout this campaign and after has been engaging in mass physical violence? I'm really gonna need to see some sources on this, since the white-supremacist hate crimes and police violence against the working class have been the primary source of violence I've heard about this year.

91 points by bootload 10y ago

jk563 10y ago

> "I used Twitter accounts I controlled (“bots,” although they aren’t acting autonomously) to send messages" It's a shame they over-hyped the title and made it all clickbaity. The post itself clearly states that they are not autonomous and therefore not programmed. Possibly not helped by the use of the word "bot" over and over. Am I right in saying "bot" implies autonomous? That aside, interesting short read with a fairly intuative result. Good to see it backed up with actual research. Though it doesn't mention how many accounts were targetted during the research. Is there potential a way of analysing messages for racism in the same way some do sentiment analysis? Is it the same sort of problem? Not even a beginner in the field, let alone an expert!

rtpg 10y ago
there's the small issue of the use-mention distinction, but generally I imagine it could work well. There are so many dog-whistles out there (especially for the alt-right) that the sort of overtly racist comments on Twitter would come out quickly. In Twitter's case, follower graphs would also probably be a good indicator, at least for people who follow less than 200 accounts. Not to mention that a lot of these people overtly say in their twitter bios that they're part of the frog police or whatever. Twitter could nuke Alt-right Twitter from orbit pretty easily. Then they'd just go run off and use some "actual free speech" twitter clone and fester in their own space. Just like they do when reddit/4chan cleans house.
- astrobe_ 10y ago
  Populate those clone sites with troll-feeding bots for maximum efficiency.
- jk563 10y ago
  I don't think banning (my assumption of your intention behind nuking) is the correct course of action. I just had a similar chain of thought at a story of a students union wanting to ban certain newspapers from the campus. My opinion is that, in that instance, the union should focus on the people who buy those newspapers. Why do they buy them? Do they agree with the messages? Or perhaps they are believing what they see without critical thought? There is then either an ideological debate or perhaps critical thinking education that can be undertaken. Hiding the message of an organisation or individual seems morally wrong to me. I'd much rather see the opinions published and shunned rather than outright censored. In the Twitter example, I'd like to see the classifications used to help understand the viewpoint of others or provide further information prior to posting, rather than to censor / ban individuals or groups. Not a fully formed idea, for which I apologise. My gut (and it is only my gut) tells me there is a useful aid there.
  - rtpg 10y ago
    I have a bit of trouble with these arguments, because the "free speech" argument feels really recent to me. At it's core, twitter is an assemblage of communities. Twitter can simply decide that, no, it doesn't want neo-nazis on its website. These people are then free to go make their own websites to hang out on. Websites like Digg or Something Awful, despite also not being about single topics, were never sitting around thinking "Oh, I want to ban this guy that goes around calling black people monkeys, but free speech". Even 4chan would ban people for that sort of dumb stuff. I feel like this argument only became prevalent after reddit became big. There is an argument to be made that reddit's philosophy on this point single-handedly made all "community" websites worse, because it stigmatized the notion of "drawing a line in the sand", and implied that all websites have to accept everyone. I think in the newspaper example, Twitter is a newspaper, not the campus. People can make new websites easily, just like they can make new newspapers. Twitter is under no obligation to "publish" stuff if they don't want to. The internet is the campus. No DNS blocking, just banning users from some websites. And, honestly, the amount of people who care about the "free speech" issue dwarfs the amount of people who see Twitter as "the place to get trolled at". It doesn't seem like good branding to be at the same level as 8chan on this point. Though, to your point, on a more general level, figuring out what's going on in the audience for these sorts of messages is important.
krallja 10y ago
It's especially sad, because the word "sock-puppet" already exactly describes the accounts the researcher used.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

contingencies 10y ago

Is there an ethical question regarding the computer-assisted manipulation people's perspectives, however ignorant and wrong they may be? I believe so. Personally I would not write this sort of software for this reason, and consider government investment in such software an affront to basic human rights - UN Article 13, Freedom of Expression: Freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media. I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Beatrice_Hall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Beatrice_Hall (commonly misattributed to Voltaire)

whybroke 10y ago
How is it remotely blocking someone's free speech or access to information when you politely and automatically tell them that the blatant racial slur they just used might offend someone?
- guitarbill 10y ago
  One problem - and one that people often forget - is that historically, societies change their position on what's appropriate. It's also easy to see an automated approach leading to hilarious results with say tweets from African-American rappers. Finally, maybe we can move past this "might offend someone" stance that offers 0% nuance?
  - whybroke 10y ago
    It's a curious argument that says un-nuanced insults should be permitted but pointing them out as such should not. Or that in the past insults differed therefore we should ignore today's. Or that hypothetically something hilarious might happen so don't call out trolling harassment.
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  If a bot is used it's automated and you don't tell anyone anything.

rtpg 10y ago

There was a This American Life episode[1] where someone who was being harassed got contacted by the troll. The harassment was some pretty serious shit (making a twitter account of the victim's dead father, then insulting through this). But one day the attacker realized how awful the thing they did was, and ended up apologizing profusely to her. There was also that study about how people's views on gay marriage evolved substantially after just a couple conversations with a gay couple, who would say "Hey, why can't we get married?". Though there was some statistical issues with that IIRC.... I have a hard time saying "these are proof that yelling at trolls works" because there are good and bad ways of communicating the point, but it sure feels like direct confrontation works on some level. Though I don't know how well this stuff works against people from /pol/, if only because most of them don't actually care about the issues, just yelling at people. [1]: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/545/if-you-dont-have-anything-nice-to-say-say-it-in-all-caps https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/545/... (Act 1)

ivan_gammel 10y ago

Would be great to see more data from this research to understand the scale of the effect and quality of analysis. How long the measurements have been performed? Was there direct causal link between the tweet from bot and reduction of the number of racial slurs? Were there any other events that could influence the research, e.g. a hot topic that could consume most of the attention of the subjects? Was there reduction in the number of hate speech tweets at all or the subjects just switched to the milder language? How big is the effect in relative numbers?

varjag 10y ago

The findings are in a way depressing. Only the black bots with many followers cohort was any effective, probably due to intimidation effect on the offender.

darkFunction 10y ago
Did you read the same article?
mintplant 10y ago
Other way around, only the "white" bots with high follower counts were effective.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
inimino 10y ago
You misread the article. Only the white bots were effective. The black bots with many followers had a negative effect, but only on a subset of the users. Based on the effect sizes and without more data these finding don't look terribly robust anyway.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

mibbiting 10y ago

"and I only included subjects who appeared to be a white man" Ah yes of course - racism can only be carried out by white men after all. What a pile of rubbish. If you take offense at words, things are going to get progressively worse for you as more and more automated bots enter the scene. The answer of course, is for people to stop taking offense. Do these people get offended at spam emails suggesting they need viagra or a fuckbuddy? What's the point?

inimino 10y ago
> racism can only be carried out by white men after all ...because he wanted to test the in-group out-group effect. Furthermore given the metric he was using... Honestly, did you even read the article?
- Chris2048 10y ago
  Can you expand on "given the metric he was using"?
  - inimino 10y ago
    He measured use of a particular ethnic slur, the interpretation of which can vary depending on who is using it.
    - mibbiting 10y ago
      eg racism can only be performed by white people.
      - Chris2048 10y ago
        Not so much that, as much as the only kind of racism being investigated was that of white people.
        mibbiting 10y ago

dkarapetyan 10y ago

Isn't it interesting that time and again every online forum with moderate affordances for anonymity quickly degrades into name calling and other generic abuse? Seems like the only way to combat this degradation is with heroic manual effort. Maybe there are automated ways around the problem but it's tricky balancing open discourse with automatic banning of abusive accounts since any kind of automated system will invariably stifle legitimate discussions. The word "nigger" when used in a discussion with the proper historical or even comedic context can be benign but I doubt any automated system will be able to make the distinction since that would require some kind of understanding of history and comedy. For example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOwjtNEoRYg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOwjtNEoRYg

reitanqild 10y ago
> Isn't it interesting that time and again every online forum with moderate affordances for anonymity quickly degrades into name calling and other generic abuse? Happens in systems with Full Real Name policies as well. IMO Full Real Name policies only deter people who 1. Have something to lose 2. Have a dissenting view 3. Does use a fake account with a Fake Real Name. I.e. IMO a Full Real Name policy alone just sets us up for an echo chamber situation.
HenryTheHorse 10y ago
Community moderation is no joke, but the gold standard for sustaining an incredibly civil, intelligent community is probably Metafilter. Then again, their size is tiny fraction of Twitter's or Reddit's.
- pekk 10y ago
  Isn't this the problem, that some forums get too big to moderate?

aaron-lebo 10y ago

These findings are less than exciting: Comparing across the panels of Figure 4 shows the decay in the effect of Treatment C over time. Although the effect remains statistically significant, the coefficient decreases steadily. In Panel A, the point estimate of -.27 indicates that the daily rate of the use of the word “_” decreased by .27 more among subjects in Treatment condition C than among subjects in the control condition. This average treatment effect for condition C decreased in magnitude to -.17 in Panel B and -.11 in Panel C. I collected data for 2 months, but these results are not shown because none of the treatments are significant. ... Encouragingly, these effects persisted over time, for the first month under study, although not for two months. Also, the effect was significant at p < .05 in the two week time period, but it was only significant at p < .10 in the one week and one month time periods. Wow! The subjects cut back on their slurs for the next month (and what is the practical difference in .27 fewer daily slurs compared to the control group?)....and then they started doing it again. http://kmunger.github.io/pdfs/Twitter_harassment_final.pdf http://kmunger.github.io/pdfs/Twitter_harassment_final.pdf Can't help but wonder how you get a Washington Post article out of that. It's a good graduate-level semester paper. What connections does this guy have?

fdsaaf 10y ago

Is this Twitter that's fighting racism also the Twitter with this moderation policy? [nsfw] https://i.sli.mg/2V7OlX.jpg https://i.sli.mg/2V7OlX.jpg

danjc 10y ago

Did I miss it or is there no mention of sample size and average tweets/day/sampled user?

kutkloon7 10y ago

"I used a racial slur as the search term because I thought of it as the strongest evidence that a tweet might contain racist harassment. I restricted the sample to users who had a history of using offensive language, and I only included subjects who appeared to be a white man or who were anonymous." Right, because white men are the only people are the only ones who can be racist. If you have to rely on a criterion like this, that's a very good sign that the method you use is not objective. Besides that, I really like the reply the author chose, the message and its phrasing seem very effective, while staying respectful towards the tweeter.

BigJeffeRonaldo 10y ago
They were guilty of being white.
cooper12 10y ago
You're reading a lot into something they didn't even claim. They explain why they had to choose a specific race in the following paragraph: > It was essential to keep the race and gender of the subjects constant to test my central question: How would reactions to my sanctioning message change based on the race of the bot sending the message? Why they chose people who were white shouldn't really matter as their conclusion was not "white men are racists". It was just something that had to be kept constant and grouping on race is not something unfamiliar for researchers, especially since in this case the whole experiment was based on the races of the sender and receiver. (Also note that it's much easier to distinguish between black and white rather than if they made the profile pictures different shades on the Fitzpatrick Scale)

cs2818 10y ago

As a CS researcher who often assists researchers in sociology with Twitter studies I struggle with how accurate or meaningful the results are when the study depends on inferring too much about specific users. I have never conducted a study which involved actively intervening (and would like to know how IRB approval was obtained to do so), but the number of inferences which must be made are difficult enough when simply observing user activity. I would think running manipulation checks for the user's perception of the intervening profile would be nearly impossible. Ultimately what is most difficult about Twitter studies is that the data collected is rarely available for inspection by anyone other than the researcher collecting it. When so many subjective decisions must be made in analysis this is particularly troublesome.

motardo 10y ago

The sample size was 242. If you click the link to the paper, then click the supplementary material link, you get [this pdf](https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1007%2Fs11109-016-9373-5/MediaObjects/11109_2016_9373_MOESM1_ESM.pdf https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1007%2Fs111...) that explains the methods.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago

What has to kill the alt-right is sunlight: drag their ideas into public and point out how those are wrong. With a boot, if necessary. So for instance, no, race is not a biologically meaningful signifier.

sctb 10y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12992743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12992743 and marked it off-topic.

hga 10y ago

Indeed you're correct, that sure worked wonders for President-Elect Hillary! (http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign/293359-full-speech-hillary-clinton-attacks-alt-right-and http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign/...) As for the "boot", I'll just note that in the US at least, it's us on the Right who own the guns. Good luck trying that; any particular reason the anti-Trump election rioters seem to be limiting themselves to Blue areas?

eli_gottlieb 10y ago
Ooooh, threatening to shoot leftists on Hacker News. Really edgy.
- hga 10y ago
  Is an in implicit threat of self-defense an improper response to your all but explicit threat of mass physical violence? Coming from the side that throughout this campaign and after has been engaging in mass physical violence? If you want edgy, [censored by dang], but search way way back in my comment history if you insist.
  - sctb 10y ago
    > ...[censored by dang]... That isn't true or fair. All we've done is ask you not to use Hacker News to engage in political and ideological warfare, which is not what the site is for, and which we have to ask you again to please stop! The fact that this thread is not up to the standards of civility doesn't give us permission to make it worse.
    - hga 10y ago
      In other words, self-defense is doubleplusungood, in the discussions or in real life. Got it.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    >Coming from the side that throughout this campaign and after has been engaging in mass physical violence? I'm really gonna need to see some sources on this, since the white-supremacist hate crimes and police violence against the working class have been the primary source of violence I've heard about this year.