3 ms·

It took me a while, but I found it News source: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-63330885 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-63330885 Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/

It took me a while, but I found it News source: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-63330885 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-63330885 Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/petesherlock79/status/1590253174845153280?s=20&t=LauWoQPTCqGGNaX7S9xEWA https://twitter.com/petesherlock79/status/159025317484515328... And a response thread explaining the flaws in the methodology: As news source: https://novaramedia.com/2022/11/09/the-bbcs-investigation-into-online-abuse-is-total-bullshit/ https://novaramedia.com/2022/11/09/the-bbcs-investigation-in... And on twitter: https://twitter.com/AyoCaesar/status/1590403667974582272 https://twitter.com/AyoCaesar/status/1590403667974582272 Basically the model was developed at google to find “toxic speech”, but the researchers had a very biased definition on what constituted as “toxic”. Racist speech didn’t count, while angry shouts did.

nonethewiser 4y ago
I would expect there is more racist speech against white people than anyone else. Regardless, race doesn’t put someone in a particular political group so I don’t see how it debunks anything. Did the critics measure racist speech?
- runarberg 4y ago
  Short answer: Yes, they tested the model with racist speech, and it failed. > I entered a selection of racist tweets I’d received in the past year into Perspective’s API, of varying lengths and sentence complexity. Just to make it easy for the machine, I deliberately chose one which included a common racial slur against South Asians. > None of these were registered as potentially toxic at all by the AI – but, “You’re a fucking G”, a compliment, popped up with a 90.29% likelihood of being toxic. Your hypotheses that white MPs experience more racist speech than non-white MPs, is testable. I have a pretty strong feeling that you are wrong, but I haven’t seen any data to support either (only anecdotes; and this deeply flawed analysis). What you can do to test your hypotheses is find all British MPs on twitter, scrape all tweets directed at them, and measure the proportion of racist speech against them. However, I advice you to do a more traditional cluster analysis, rather than a training model, the latter is very likely to yield a flawed model just like the journalist’s “8 month labor of love”.

nonethewiser 4y ago

I would expect there is more racist speech against white people than anyone else. Regardless, race doesn’t put someone in a particular political group so I don’t see how it debunks anything. Did the critics measure racist speech?

runarberg 4y ago
Short answer: Yes, they tested the model with racist speech, and it failed. > I entered a selection of racist tweets I’d received in the past year into Perspective’s API, of varying lengths and sentence complexity. Just to make it easy for the machine, I deliberately chose one which included a common racial slur against South Asians. > None of these were registered as potentially toxic at all by the AI – but, “You’re a fucking G”, a compliment, popped up with a 90.29% likelihood of being toxic. Your hypotheses that white MPs experience more racist speech than non-white MPs, is testable. I have a pretty strong feeling that you are wrong, but I haven’t seen any data to support either (only anecdotes; and this deeply flawed analysis). What you can do to test your hypotheses is find all British MPs on twitter, scrape all tweets directed at them, and measure the proportion of racist speech against them. However, I advice you to do a more traditional cluster analysis, rather than a training model, the latter is very likely to yield a flawed model just like the journalist’s “8 month labor of love”.