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Banning hate communities does work though [0]. I assume that the results are similar for twitter and facebook. "Hateful" Reddit or FB communities also don't all

by faet 5y ago

Banning hate communities does work though [0]. I assume that the results are similar for twitter and facebook. "Hateful" Reddit or FB communities also don't allow "free speech". The moderators will ban people who go against the grain. There is no free exchange of ideas or disputing as if you're going against the grain you'll just get banned from that community (but not the platform). As such, either the platforms allow the hateful communities to just exist in their 'safe space silo' or they de-platform them. [0] http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf

londgine 5y ago
> Banning hate communities does work though ... The sentence is incomplete. Banning X communities does work to achieve the goal of people not talking about X. I don't think that your linked study is really necessary, the Chinese cultural revolution worked really well (to achieve the goal of "preserving Chinese communism") [0]. Imagine if 30 years ago large digital monopolies banned what was considered unmentionable back then. I doubt gay marriage would have been legalised in America. All of the progress that we have in making marijuana more legal would have been terminated by the companies wanting to prevent people advocating illegal drug usage. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution
- Clubber 5y ago
  >Banning X communities does work to achieve the goal of people not talking about X. Honestly I'm not sure that is even accurate, I would imagine it does the opposite. People are drawn to what's not allowed, it's even one of the morals of the Adam and Eve story. Pretty old but still relevant idea of human nature. Here's an interesting story about Goldberger who defended the Neo Nazis in Skokie. https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/rights-protesters/skokie-case-how-i-came-represent-free-speech-rights-nazis https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/rights-protesters/sk...
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    From a former Communist country: whatever was banned (jokes about the Party or the Soviet Union, various conspiracies or whatever correct-but-undesirable information out there, such as the Chernobyl accident in the first days), spread like wildfire by "whispering channels". People are really drawn to forbidden fruit.
    - kongin 5y ago
      You need to understand that the people who are saying we must ban misinformation are the party apparatchiks, trying to argue in good faith with them is pointless. The only reason to engage is to show the silent majority that they aren't crazy for disagreeing with those in power.
- da_chicken 5y ago
  Chinese censorship is backed by the threat of arbitrary imprisonment or violence. In that case, it's not really the banning of the topic that's working, it's policing for compliance and de facto criminalization of defiance.
- majormajor 5y ago
  Homosexuality in general was effectively banned by dominant platforms in the US for quite some time! It was a BIG DEAL to people when gay characters started becoming more common in mass media. But note the order it happened. The privately-set standards moved with the times much faster than the government ones did! Writers/tv execs/etc heard both the pro-equality arguments as well as the anti-homosexuality arguments and made their own choices as they were persuaded to. Many states, on the other hand, never legalized gay marriage before the court decision overruled their laws. So that seems to show that we should empower private parties to have control over what their platform shows, over either the government or just the loudest mobs (there were MANY protests/boycott threats/etc from religious groups over this). The market gives this the advantage over the government here: the private publisher can test what sells, and over time is going to be increasingly forced to move with societal changes, while the government is much more likely to be captive to small-but-loud contingencies (especially in a gerrymandered world).
- monocasa 5y ago
  > the Chinese cultural revolution worked really well Given that the lineage in power now (the Dengists) were imprisoned under Mao during the cultural revolution, and only after Mao's death were able to perform a coup, arrest the rest of the leaders of the cultural revolution, and let the Dengists out of jail, I'm not sure that's the case.
leetcrew 5y ago
there's at least one major reason to be skeptical of that result, and they mention it in their limitations section. what they did was create a lexicon of hate speech terms from two large subs that were banned. they then counted the frequency of those terms in other subs after the ban. they found that usage of those terms dropped substantially, and concluded that the bans were effective at reducing hate speech. if you're familiar with the dynamics of these sorts of subs, the problem with this approach should be fairly obvious. these subs tend to develop their own set of specific terms/memes (hate-related or otherwise). it may be the case that the bans were effective at reducing hate speech across the whole site. but it's also possible that the same people are still posting the same stuff coded differently. this study is far from the final word on the matter.
Darmody 5y ago
Then r/politics should be banned but it's one of the biggest subreddits instead.
commandlinefan 5y ago
> Banning hate communities does work though [0] That's like saying banning smoking in the park reduces smoking because nobody's smoking in the park any more.
- bearcobra 5y ago
  I mean location based smoking bans definitely do reduce smoking rates.
- icyfox 5y ago
  These things do help. Most members of these communities get radicalized by virtue of other content they’re already browsing. If you remove the communities and force individuals to leap from Facebook to some no-name forum, they’re far less likely to engage. This phenomenon is mirrored elsewhere as well where small interventions can lead to big impacts: see suicide rates in Britain after removing carbon monoxide in their house gas. Initial friction (or means reduction in that research) can drive change.
  - idiotsecant 5y ago
    I'm not convinced we should think it's acceptable for you or I to decide who does and does not get exposed to information that will 'radicalize' them because you and I may have wildly different opinions of what constitutes a radical opinion. Humans sometimes develop stupid opinions, and that is OK. They're allowed to do that. They aren't allowed to act on those opinions in a way that constitutes a crime, which is why we go through the trouble of defining crimes in the first place. 'Precrime' thought policing seems like a pretty dangerous road to go down and one that is full of unintended consequences.
    - icyfox 5y ago
      I define a radical group to be some collection that seems to be consistently peddling false material for their own ends, with an overly provoking tilt that makes it easy to go viral. Some specifics out of the past year would be vaccine misinformation, prejudice that incites racial violence in Myanmar, organizing an occupation to the capital in the US. Shouldn't we put a stop to these communities if they sway people to start peddling this information themselves? At least in the US, free speech is most free within public forums. But even then we already define some speech that is too dangerous if it's known to lead to poor outcomes. You can't yell fire in a crowded room, not because yelling fire is inherently a crime, but because it's going to incite people to a detrimental ends. Plus social networks don't have a constitutional obligation to be town squares where free speech can spread unfettered. You have to draw a line somewhere. And as the people who write the algorithms that can amplify or bury content on these networks, I think it _is_ our obligation to at least set parameters on what constitutes good/healthy content interactions on these social platforms and what doesn't. The ML algorithms have to optimize over some loss function.
BobbyJo 5y ago
Define 'works'. This subject is an easy one in which to conflate goals. The goals of the platform are different than the goals of the public, lawmakers, etc. which is what the article is about. The goal of the platform is to pull in more users. Having less abusive language and users is a means to that end, as is appeasing general public outcries for more moderation. The goal of the public and lawmakers is, hopefully, more effective and meaningful discourse. The paper you link measure for the prior outcome, not the latter. Edit: Just to comment on the outcome you are referring to though, I don't believe the bans actually lead to more meaningful and effective discourse on Reddit. I don't even thing it lead to more civil discourse. You can click on literally any politically sensitive topic on the front page and you'll find that almost all the top comments both lean in a specific direction (diversity of discourse is terrible) and the deride anyone who disagrees. Maybe they use the 'F' word less, and no one is using the 'N' word anymore, but it is very obvious that it has become a strongly homogenized platform that doesn't welcome nuanced opinions.
- majormajor 5y ago
  "More effective discourse" is probably far too aspirational a goal for lawmakers/government. It's also probably too subjective. Less violence, on the other hand, is a clearer goal that aligns with existing laws against violence, so it has a firmer basis, in line with existing restrictions on speech. It also gives you a non-partisan measuring stick. Private platforms, on the other hand, will have more flexibility in trying to maintain, say, discussion quality as a goal (see HN's stated moderation goals vs Reddit's). Or disinformation, or language/profanity, or whatever else a private moderator may choose. The government telling those private parties that they can't set their own standards, though, seems like a particularly terrible direction to go.
  - BobbyJo 5y ago
    It's no more subjective than 'less violence' provided the interested parties define measures for success. I mean, if the government can set goals for employment, then surely they can set them for civic engagement and disinformation. Totally agree with your last two points.
  - 5y ago
naasking 5y ago
Sure it worked at reducing hate speech on reddit, but is that the right objective? It's not implausible to think that the resentment from such local measures could cause hate to increase in a more global sense. Kind of like entropy in thermodynamics: local work can reduce local entropy, but at the expense of causing a global increase in entropy. If the real objective should be a global decrease in hate, then maybe local suppression/exile might not be the right mechanism.
- gremloni 5y ago
  The hate is in part generated by a continuous bubbled feedback loop. Cutting out the source(s) usually doesn’t lead to a redirection and rather has a chilling effect.
  - naasking 5y ago
    A plausible hypothesis, but needs data.
    - gremloni 5y ago
      Pretty much how it played out with r/fatpeoplehate. Anecdotal yes, but there are quite a few more examples on Reddit alone.
      - naasking 5y ago
        You have evidence that fat person hate has decreased globally beyond reddit?
        gremloni 5y ago
        Anecdotally it definitely has at least online. I don’t see people killing fat people for being fat either so it hasn’t graduated to radicalization.
- simonh 5y ago
  I suppose to the extent these channels of communication recruit and radicalise, if they are shut down they will not be able to recruit and radicalise. The act of shutting them down might infuriate regular users of these channels, but they’re already radicalised anyway.
PerkinWarwick 5y ago
>"Hateful" Reddit or FB communities also don't allow "free speech". The moderators will ban people who go against the grain. Which is fine I think, but why have Reddit or FB do the censoring (aside from things that are outright illegal). I don't much care if a bunch of Nazis or tankies are busy planning world domination on Reddit while sharing recipes. Why do you care?
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  > Why do you care? Because zero moderation beyond criminal content is 8chan, which arguably inspired mass shootings. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/04/three-mass-shootings-this-year-began-with-hateful-screed-chan-its-founder-calls-it-terrorist-refuge-plain-sight/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/04/three-m...
  - PerkinWarwick 5y ago
    Zero moderation beyond criminal content is/was basically Usenet alt groups. Somehow the world survived all those years. Listen, I understand the need to cordon off the wrongthink people so that they can't communicate with each other, I just don't agree with it.
  - notchFilter54 5y ago
    And when you ban misinformation on your platform, that "anti-vaxxer" instead goes to 8chan where by your argument might inspire them to shoot people up.
    - joshuamorton 5y ago
      Given the size of 8 Chan and the size is communities banned from Reddit, we know this to be untrue.
      - notchFilter54 5y ago
        Given that Texas has greater population than Rhode Island, we know it is untrue that my uncle Bill and his friends upset with Texan policies moved from Dallas to Providence.
quantumBerry 5y ago
If all "legitimate" platforms ban hate speech, then users wanting to engage in hate speech will all go to some platform that radically allows all speech with disproportionately this undesirable speech. They will intermingle disproportionately with those spreading sexual abuse images, drugs, insurgent propaganda and instructional material, and other undesirable material. Facebook likely makes the problem worse by forcing these "hate speech" and "disinformation users" to be completely surrounded by people with repulsive content, instead of having their repulsive content critiqued and shamed by other users. Having people with bad, hateful ideas out in the open I would argue is preferable to concentrating all these bad thoughts together with people that will reinforce that it is normal.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
N00bN00b 5y ago
I'm being censored on Reddit myself. I'm not really sure why exactly. I suspect it has to do with having a NSFW tag on my account (that I didn't put there) that I'm afraid to turn off, because of the warning that's next to that button and it doesn't explain what "swearing" is exactly and if I turn it off and write "fuck" I might get banned. My account provides a lot of help to other people, it's highly valued by the community, I have loads of karma, I've paid for quite a bit of server time by the rewards I've received. But you can't search on my username, it won't show up (not even if you have NSFW visibility turned on). I'm not about politics, or covid or any hate stuff. I'm just there to try and help people with depression, anxiety and other issues. And I'm being censored for some reason. So whatever they're doing, it's guaranteed to overreach and it's counter productive and who knows how much damage it does to society as a whole. It's just that no one knows the severity of the damage the censorship does.
- rjbwork 5y ago
  I don't think I've ever seen an account with an NSFW tag/flair. Posts? Yeah. Subreddits? Yup. Possibly a flair for your user on a particular subreddit added by a mod for some reason? Sure. But not accounts. Can you link to this tag?
  - N00bN00b 5y ago
    Oh yeah. Accounts have NSFW tags these days. Also impacts chat functionality. You'll get warnings there. They call it "profile" but your profile is 100% of your account activity. https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/pfpw4y/any_way_to_remove_nsfw_tag_from_my_account/ https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/pfpw4y/any_way_to_rem... This link has pictures in it, showing you the NSFW tag: https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/8qhay9/why_is_my_reddit_account_nsfw/ https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/8qhay9/why_is_...
  - coolgeek 5y ago
    It seems that there are a fair number of sex workers on reddit whose profiles are tagged NSFW. Presumably, they would view the tag as an asset. (I don't have any experience with these accounts myself. But I've stumbled across more than one in mainstream subreddits, and my curiosity was piqued. Only pointing this out to note that this comment reflects the totality of my knowledge on the subject.)
majormajor 5y ago
Yes, reforming users who already want to engage in hate speech is not the goal; isolation is. Look at the pre-internet times, certain forms of radicalization were far less common than they are today because they aren't very present in the in-person community (while those that WERE geographically concentrated, like racism in certain American communities, were still spread in those places). When the status quo is bad, "maybe that won't work" is not an effective argument against taking action anyway if you don't have a better idea. If we don't take action, we already know we're going to (continue to) have a bad result!
fallingknife 5y ago
Also important to note that Reddit doesn't ban hate. They ban unpopular opinions. If you want to see hate, go to r/politics.
- bedhead 5y ago
  Yup. These platforms are all perfectly 100% fine with hatred as long as it's the right kind.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
Manuel_D 5y ago
To be clear, the study found that platforms banning topics succeeds in removing those topics from the platform - not necessarily from society as a whole. The study did not conclude that banning hateful communities off of reddit actually made those users less hateful or curbed the spread of hateful content online. If each of those banned users subsequently posted twice as much hateful content on a different platform, that still comports with the conclusions of that study.
hartator 5y ago
> http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf This paper is trash. On defining hate speech, "we focus on textual content that is distinctively characteristic of these forums", so, yes, banning specific subreddits resulted in less of that content in the overall Reddit. Did it make Reddit a more friendly place? Probably not as tensions have never been higher.
- Pils 5y ago
  > Did it make Reddit a more friendly place? Probably not as tensions have never been higher. Did allowing hate speech make 8chan/Voat friendlier? There are plenty of unfriendly communities that lack overt racism/fatphobia, but I can't think of any friendly ones that do.
  - NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
    Yes. People weren't trying to censor each other so they were less pissed off.
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    8chan was a sacrificial site to distract the most fervent internet crusaders. Worked pretty well, I believe it still exists in some form, but it is out of peoples mind.
R0b0t1 5y ago
They're measuring success based on referencing the community they just banned people from, aren't they?
mlindner 5y ago
> Banning hate communities does work though According to a single study. In general I don't think it actually does. Making it harder to find is sufficient, banning it outright just proves their point and pulls additional moderates to their cause.
detcader 5y ago
Neither of your assertions are related to what is being discussed. Nuclear bombs "work" and bad people would do horrible things with them, but that doesn't say anything about if we should use them.
raxxorrax 5y ago
The exact same is true for political communities that aren't declared as a hate communities. So no, banning hate does not work. It does work if you define work as this study did, which has problems to say the least. Today reddit is even more hateful than before, although that is a subjective meassure, but 5-10 years ago you at least had standards to not wish death on people you disagree with for the most part. There were exceptions, today it is very common. I would argue the study is wrong.

by faet 5y ago

londgine 5y ago

> Banning hate communities does work though ... The sentence is incomplete. Banning X communities does work to achieve the goal of people not talking about X. I don't think that your linked study is really necessary, the Chinese cultural revolution worked really well (to achieve the goal of "preserving Chinese communism") [0]. Imagine if 30 years ago large digital monopolies banned what was considered unmentionable back then. I doubt gay marriage would have been legalised in America. All of the progress that we have in making marijuana more legal would have been terminated by the companies wanting to prevent people advocating illegal drug usage. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution

Clubber 5y ago
>Banning X communities does work to achieve the goal of people not talking about X. Honestly I'm not sure that is even accurate, I would imagine it does the opposite. People are drawn to what's not allowed, it's even one of the morals of the Adam and Eve story. Pretty old but still relevant idea of human nature. Here's an interesting story about Goldberger who defended the Neo Nazis in Skokie. https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/rights-protesters/skokie-case-how-i-came-represent-free-speech-rights-nazis https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/rights-protesters/sk...
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  From a former Communist country: whatever was banned (jokes about the Party or the Soviet Union, various conspiracies or whatever correct-but-undesirable information out there, such as the Chernobyl accident in the first days), spread like wildfire by "whispering channels". People are really drawn to forbidden fruit.
  - kongin 5y ago
    You need to understand that the people who are saying we must ban misinformation are the party apparatchiks, trying to argue in good faith with them is pointless. The only reason to engage is to show the silent majority that they aren't crazy for disagreeing with those in power.
da_chicken 5y ago
Chinese censorship is backed by the threat of arbitrary imprisonment or violence. In that case, it's not really the banning of the topic that's working, it's policing for compliance and de facto criminalization of defiance.
majormajor 5y ago
Homosexuality in general was effectively banned by dominant platforms in the US for quite some time! It was a BIG DEAL to people when gay characters started becoming more common in mass media. But note the order it happened. The privately-set standards moved with the times much faster than the government ones did! Writers/tv execs/etc heard both the pro-equality arguments as well as the anti-homosexuality arguments and made their own choices as they were persuaded to. Many states, on the other hand, never legalized gay marriage before the court decision overruled their laws. So that seems to show that we should empower private parties to have control over what their platform shows, over either the government or just the loudest mobs (there were MANY protests/boycott threats/etc from religious groups over this). The market gives this the advantage over the government here: the private publisher can test what sells, and over time is going to be increasingly forced to move with societal changes, while the government is much more likely to be captive to small-but-loud contingencies (especially in a gerrymandered world).
monocasa 5y ago
> the Chinese cultural revolution worked really well Given that the lineage in power now (the Dengists) were imprisoned under Mao during the cultural revolution, and only after Mao's death were able to perform a coup, arrest the rest of the leaders of the cultural revolution, and let the Dengists out of jail, I'm not sure that's the case.

leetcrew 5y ago

there's at least one major reason to be skeptical of that result, and they mention it in their limitations section. what they did was create a lexicon of hate speech terms from two large subs that were banned. they then counted the frequency of those terms in other subs after the ban. they found that usage of those terms dropped substantially, and concluded that the bans were effective at reducing hate speech. if you're familiar with the dynamics of these sorts of subs, the problem with this approach should be fairly obvious. these subs tend to develop their own set of specific terms/memes (hate-related or otherwise). it may be the case that the bans were effective at reducing hate speech across the whole site. but it's also possible that the same people are still posting the same stuff coded differently. this study is far from the final word on the matter.

Darmody 5y ago

Then r/politics should be banned but it's one of the biggest subreddits instead.

commandlinefan 5y ago

> Banning hate communities does work though [0] That's like saying banning smoking in the park reduces smoking because nobody's smoking in the park any more.

bearcobra 5y ago
I mean location based smoking bans definitely do reduce smoking rates.
icyfox 5y ago
These things do help. Most members of these communities get radicalized by virtue of other content they’re already browsing. If you remove the communities and force individuals to leap from Facebook to some no-name forum, they’re far less likely to engage. This phenomenon is mirrored elsewhere as well where small interventions can lead to big impacts: see suicide rates in Britain after removing carbon monoxide in their house gas. Initial friction (or means reduction in that research) can drive change.
- idiotsecant 5y ago
  I'm not convinced we should think it's acceptable for you or I to decide who does and does not get exposed to information that will 'radicalize' them because you and I may have wildly different opinions of what constitutes a radical opinion. Humans sometimes develop stupid opinions, and that is OK. They're allowed to do that. They aren't allowed to act on those opinions in a way that constitutes a crime, which is why we go through the trouble of defining crimes in the first place. 'Precrime' thought policing seems like a pretty dangerous road to go down and one that is full of unintended consequences.
  - icyfox 5y ago
    I define a radical group to be some collection that seems to be consistently peddling false material for their own ends, with an overly provoking tilt that makes it easy to go viral. Some specifics out of the past year would be vaccine misinformation, prejudice that incites racial violence in Myanmar, organizing an occupation to the capital in the US. Shouldn't we put a stop to these communities if they sway people to start peddling this information themselves? At least in the US, free speech is most free within public forums. But even then we already define some speech that is too dangerous if it's known to lead to poor outcomes. You can't yell fire in a crowded room, not because yelling fire is inherently a crime, but because it's going to incite people to a detrimental ends. Plus social networks don't have a constitutional obligation to be town squares where free speech can spread unfettered. You have to draw a line somewhere. And as the people who write the algorithms that can amplify or bury content on these networks, I think it _is_ our obligation to at least set parameters on what constitutes good/healthy content interactions on these social platforms and what doesn't. The ML algorithms have to optimize over some loss function.

BobbyJo 5y ago

Define 'works'. This subject is an easy one in which to conflate goals. The goals of the platform are different than the goals of the public, lawmakers, etc. which is what the article is about. The goal of the platform is to pull in more users. Having less abusive language and users is a means to that end, as is appeasing general public outcries for more moderation. The goal of the public and lawmakers is, hopefully, more effective and meaningful discourse. The paper you link measure for the prior outcome, not the latter. Edit: Just to comment on the outcome you are referring to though, I don't believe the bans actually lead to more meaningful and effective discourse on Reddit. I don't even thing it lead to more civil discourse. You can click on literally any politically sensitive topic on the front page and you'll find that almost all the top comments both lean in a specific direction (diversity of discourse is terrible) and the deride anyone who disagrees. Maybe they use the 'F' word less, and no one is using the 'N' word anymore, but it is very obvious that it has become a strongly homogenized platform that doesn't welcome nuanced opinions.

majormajor 5y ago
"More effective discourse" is probably far too aspirational a goal for lawmakers/government. It's also probably too subjective. Less violence, on the other hand, is a clearer goal that aligns with existing laws against violence, so it has a firmer basis, in line with existing restrictions on speech. It also gives you a non-partisan measuring stick. Private platforms, on the other hand, will have more flexibility in trying to maintain, say, discussion quality as a goal (see HN's stated moderation goals vs Reddit's). Or disinformation, or language/profanity, or whatever else a private moderator may choose. The government telling those private parties that they can't set their own standards, though, seems like a particularly terrible direction to go.
- BobbyJo 5y ago
  It's no more subjective than 'less violence' provided the interested parties define measures for success. I mean, if the government can set goals for employment, then surely they can set them for civic engagement and disinformation. Totally agree with your last two points.
- 5y ago

naasking 5y ago

Sure it worked at reducing hate speech on reddit, but is that the right objective? It's not implausible to think that the resentment from such local measures could cause hate to increase in a more global sense. Kind of like entropy in thermodynamics: local work can reduce local entropy, but at the expense of causing a global increase in entropy. If the real objective should be a global decrease in hate, then maybe local suppression/exile might not be the right mechanism.

gremloni 5y ago
The hate is in part generated by a continuous bubbled feedback loop. Cutting out the source(s) usually doesn’t lead to a redirection and rather has a chilling effect.
- naasking 5y ago
  A plausible hypothesis, but needs data.
  - gremloni 5y ago
    Pretty much how it played out with r/fatpeoplehate. Anecdotal yes, but there are quite a few more examples on Reddit alone.
    - naasking 5y ago
      You have evidence that fat person hate has decreased globally beyond reddit?
      - gremloni 5y ago
        Anecdotally it definitely has at least online. I don’t see people killing fat people for being fat either so it hasn’t graduated to radicalization.
simonh 5y ago
I suppose to the extent these channels of communication recruit and radicalise, if they are shut down they will not be able to recruit and radicalise. The act of shutting them down might infuriate regular users of these channels, but they’re already radicalised anyway.

PerkinWarwick 5y ago

>"Hateful" Reddit or FB communities also don't allow "free speech". The moderators will ban people who go against the grain. Which is fine I think, but why have Reddit or FB do the censoring (aside from things that are outright illegal). I don't much care if a bunch of Nazis or tankies are busy planning world domination on Reddit while sharing recipes. Why do you care?

fighterpilot 5y ago
> Why do you care? Because zero moderation beyond criminal content is 8chan, which arguably inspired mass shootings. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/04/three-mass-shootings-this-year-began-with-hateful-screed-chan-its-founder-calls-it-terrorist-refuge-plain-sight/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/04/three-m...
- PerkinWarwick 5y ago
  Zero moderation beyond criminal content is/was basically Usenet alt groups. Somehow the world survived all those years. Listen, I understand the need to cordon off the wrongthink people so that they can't communicate with each other, I just don't agree with it.
- notchFilter54 5y ago
  And when you ban misinformation on your platform, that "anti-vaxxer" instead goes to 8chan where by your argument might inspire them to shoot people up.
  - joshuamorton 5y ago
    Given the size of 8 Chan and the size is communities banned from Reddit, we know this to be untrue.
    - notchFilter54 5y ago
      Given that Texas has greater population than Rhode Island, we know it is untrue that my uncle Bill and his friends upset with Texan policies moved from Dallas to Providence.

quantumBerry 5y ago

If all "legitimate" platforms ban hate speech, then users wanting to engage in hate speech will all go to some platform that radically allows all speech with disproportionately this undesirable speech. They will intermingle disproportionately with those spreading sexual abuse images, drugs, insurgent propaganda and instructional material, and other undesirable material. Facebook likely makes the problem worse by forcing these "hate speech" and "disinformation users" to be completely surrounded by people with repulsive content, instead of having their repulsive content critiqued and shamed by other users. Having people with bad, hateful ideas out in the open I would argue is preferable to concentrating all these bad thoughts together with people that will reinforce that it is normal.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

N00bN00b 5y ago

I'm being censored on Reddit myself. I'm not really sure why exactly. I suspect it has to do with having a NSFW tag on my account (that I didn't put there) that I'm afraid to turn off, because of the warning that's next to that button and it doesn't explain what "swearing" is exactly and if I turn it off and write "fuck" I might get banned. My account provides a lot of help to other people, it's highly valued by the community, I have loads of karma, I've paid for quite a bit of server time by the rewards I've received. But you can't search on my username, it won't show up (not even if you have NSFW visibility turned on). I'm not about politics, or covid or any hate stuff. I'm just there to try and help people with depression, anxiety and other issues. And I'm being censored for some reason. So whatever they're doing, it's guaranteed to overreach and it's counter productive and who knows how much damage it does to society as a whole. It's just that no one knows the severity of the damage the censorship does.

rjbwork 5y ago
I don't think I've ever seen an account with an NSFW tag/flair. Posts? Yeah. Subreddits? Yup. Possibly a flair for your user on a particular subreddit added by a mod for some reason? Sure. But not accounts. Can you link to this tag?
- N00bN00b 5y ago
  Oh yeah. Accounts have NSFW tags these days. Also impacts chat functionality. You'll get warnings there. They call it "profile" but your profile is 100% of your account activity. https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/pfpw4y/any_way_to_remove_nsfw_tag_from_my_account/ https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/pfpw4y/any_way_to_rem... This link has pictures in it, showing you the NSFW tag: https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/8qhay9/why_is_my_reddit_account_nsfw/ https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/8qhay9/why_is_...
- coolgeek 5y ago
  It seems that there are a fair number of sex workers on reddit whose profiles are tagged NSFW. Presumably, they would view the tag as an asset. (I don't have any experience with these accounts myself. But I've stumbled across more than one in mainstream subreddits, and my curiosity was piqued. Only pointing this out to note that this comment reflects the totality of my knowledge on the subject.)

majormajor 5y ago

Yes, reforming users who already want to engage in hate speech is not the goal; isolation is. Look at the pre-internet times, certain forms of radicalization were far less common than they are today because they aren't very present in the in-person community (while those that WERE geographically concentrated, like racism in certain American communities, were still spread in those places). When the status quo is bad, "maybe that won't work" is not an effective argument against taking action anyway if you don't have a better idea. If we don't take action, we already know we're going to (continue to) have a bad result!

fallingknife 5y ago

Also important to note that Reddit doesn't ban hate. They ban unpopular opinions. If you want to see hate, go to r/politics.

bedhead 5y ago
Yup. These platforms are all perfectly 100% fine with hatred as long as it's the right kind.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

Manuel_D 5y ago

To be clear, the study found that platforms banning topics succeeds in removing those topics from the platform - not necessarily from society as a whole. The study did not conclude that banning hateful communities off of reddit actually made those users less hateful or curbed the spread of hateful content online. If each of those banned users subsequently posted twice as much hateful content on a different platform, that still comports with the conclusions of that study.

hartator 5y ago

> http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf This paper is trash. On defining hate speech, "we focus on textual content that is distinctively characteristic of these forums", so, yes, banning specific subreddits resulted in less of that content in the overall Reddit. Did it make Reddit a more friendly place? Probably not as tensions have never been higher.

Pils 5y ago
> Did it make Reddit a more friendly place? Probably not as tensions have never been higher. Did allowing hate speech make 8chan/Voat friendlier? There are plenty of unfriendly communities that lack overt racism/fatphobia, but I can't think of any friendly ones that do.
- NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
  Yes. People weren't trying to censor each other so they were less pissed off.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  8chan was a sacrificial site to distract the most fervent internet crusaders. Worked pretty well, I believe it still exists in some form, but it is out of peoples mind.

R0b0t1 5y ago

They're measuring success based on referencing the community they just banned people from, aren't they?

mlindner 5y ago

> Banning hate communities does work though According to a single study. In general I don't think it actually does. Making it harder to find is sufficient, banning it outright just proves their point and pulls additional moderates to their cause.

detcader 5y ago

Neither of your assertions are related to what is being discussed. Nuclear bombs "work" and bad people would do horrible things with them, but that doesn't say anything about if we should use them.

raxxorrax 5y ago

The exact same is true for political communities that aren't declared as a hate communities. So no, banning hate does not work. It does work if you define work as this study did, which has problems to say the least. Today reddit is even more hateful than before, although that is a subjective meassure, but 5-10 years ago you at least had standards to not wish death on people you disagree with for the most part. There were exceptions, today it is very common. I would argue the study is wrong.