6 ms·

A shame he didn't go deeper. The analysis here is very superficial, basically consisting of him browsing the forum for a while and doing some number crunching o

by tinco 12y ago

A shame he didn't go deeper. The analysis here is very superficial, basically consisting of him browsing the forum for a while and doing some number crunching on profile data. A bit disappointing for a NYT article, even if it is just on their website. It would have been much nicer if he did a proper data analysis of forum posts. If we've ruled out social economic class and education, what big factor remains? I suppose it would be friends and family. Perhaps a linguistic analysis could reveal how connected these people are to each other. Perhaps some psychological analysis could reveal something about their personalities other than "a perfectly nice and intelligent young woman". If we could locate the source of these ideas, perhaps there could be a way of battling it. From my experience, people who post on forums are just the tip of the iceberg of the people who share their opinions and beliefs. For every person who voices an opinion there could be hundreds who share it. Perhaps you could use the linguistic analysis to track their beliefs to key influencers.

sethsd 12y ago
Hey, thanks for comment. I'm a bit skeptical of the whole linguistic analysis thing, for various reasons. But I could be convinced otherwise (Also this would bias the analysis away from people who just register and lurk) ... Another thing I looked at was Facebook profiles. But this part was cut due to space. Here's what I found: Not surprisingly, most Stormfront users do not want to announce their white nationalism to the world. But about 100 Americans say on Facebook that they like Stormfront and are publicly searchable. This small, selected sample can offer suggestive clues to the membership of such sites. Are, for example, white nationalists unpopular and social pariahs? Nearly 80 percent of Stormfront fans had more than 100 Facebook friends. Nearly 60 percent had more than 200 friends. By comparison, a 2011 study found only half of Facebook users had more than 100 friends. Finally, another thing that was interesting was the percent of people who are atheists on the site. But I wasn't sure exactly what to compare that to, so that got cut too. - Seth
- henrymercer 12y ago
  "Why do some people feel this way?...And I can honestly offer the following answer: I have no idea." Do you actually not know? Or are you asking rhetorically? The reasons seem pretty obvious to me, not sure why they would be hard to figure out.
  - sethsd 12y ago
    i meant that i don't know what the answer is. because the obvious answers that sound really good -- diversity, education, economic development -- may not work.
    - henrymercer 12y ago
      IMO, the Stromfront-type writings consist of about 30% legitimate grievance and perhaps 70% crackpottery, all portrayed in a grossly simplified and vulgar way. Part of the fuel for the crackpottery, is that the media/NYTimes in general ignore or downplay the legitimate grievances. Once you stop believing the NYTimes, well, what do you believe? You can believe anything a random site on the internet says. So one obvious answer, which you left out, is to actually address the legitimate grievances. The other obvious answer is censorship. Why don't we have a Stormfront TV channel? Because such a channel could never get a cable license, and if it did, it would get sued out of existence. Surely some lawsuit can be conjured up to shut down Stormfront, and make it impossible for other web hosts to host such sites? So either address the grievances and make peace or crush them underfoot and leave no doubt - those are always the two traditional ways to deal with hateful dissenters.
      - michaelochurch 12y ago
        30% legitimate grievance Legitimate grievance? How is blaming the world's problems on "the Jews" (as if they all operated as one) anything remotely resembling legitimate grievance? Poor, rural white Americans are getting a raw deal (thanks, in large part, to right-wing politicians they were misled into electing) but that's because poor, rural people everywhere are getting a bad deal these days. "Whites are an oppressed group" is complete idiocy and an indefensible position.
- clarkm 12y ago
  Eh, I don't think the number of Facebook friends is a meaningful comparison here. At least, not without additional controls. If a user takes the time to seek out such niche likes on Facebook, they also probably take the time to seek out friends to add. I know Facebook doesn't have the massive fake user problem that plagues Twitter, but still, I'd wager that fake profiles, inactive accounts, and users from countries with low Facebook usage skew the average significantly. You can't really tell if they are "social [media] pariahs" unless you compare them to a representative sample. You could control for the average number of likes, and compare that to the average number of friends. Or even better, you could compare them to several groups of users who like other fringe topics (from all parts of the political spectrum) and see if they're significant outliers. In fact, this is going on my idea list. :)
  - sethsd 12y ago
    yea, that seems a better way to do it. and regardless you're dealing with such a small percentage of white nationalists and such a selected sample that it can only be suggestive. but i'm really not sure how else you could get any clues, so it seems worthwhile. -- seth
- tinco 12y ago
  Thanks a lot for making an account and taking part in the discussing, and my apologies for bashing your article a bit. Obviously the topic is very interesting and I'm very happy you made the article. I would actually be wary of the lurkers, I suppose there is a significant amount of people who are 'interested' in stormfront without actually sharing the belief who have accounts there. The Facebook statistic would be very interesting if it had been of the average Stormfront user. There's a chance the sort of person who has extreme opinions on their FB just has more friends, with only 100 out of 200.000 it's hard to tell. It's funny you are skeptical of the linguistic analysis thing while you opened the article with a quote from a girl who was impressed by the linguistic analysis of that NYT quiz ;) You can make this sort of analysis without any specific knowledge at all, a very generic n-gram analysis could give you anything from common phrases used by stormfront users to linking their identities across mediums (i.e. stormfront to twitter/facebook).
rdtsc 12y ago
> If we could locate the source of these ideas, perhaps there could be a way of battling it. That is interesting. It would be nice if there was a source for these ideas (well besides human nature) and if it was curable. We want to think these people a basically good but sick. Something happened to them and they became like this. If we could only prevent or even undo that. Could it be for example that by default people are racist and will automatically dislike others from different groups (social, religious, national, intellectual, professional). Hate of "others" is used for group cohesiveness. Maybe it isn't them that are "abnormal" but us, who maintain that we don't have these beliefs, biases and stereotypes (at least rationally). Wouldn't that be scary... Historically and geographically maybe instead of a sea of tolerance with island of hatred, it is the other way around. A sea of hatred and division with islands of tolerance. It is also interesting that we often attribute craziness to these people. I do it all the time. They are mentally sick, they are hallucinating etc etc. But if you read manifestos of killers and how these people behave towards each other, how they function in real life, you might find they are are disturbingly "normal". That that is really disturbing to me at least.
- asuffield 12y ago
  I don't think there's any innate racism, but people do tend to be hostile towards those who they see as "not of their own tribe". This view of the problem would suggest that racism is the result of people having a very narrow world-view, where they don't recognise many other people as being "like them". This would seem to be a solvable problem. We can break down communication barriers. The internet is already transforming the world in this way, and we've already come so far in the past few decades. Surely we can keep going, until nobody lives in a small corner of the world that's isolated from the rest of us.
  - kijin 12y ago
    The internet does help break down communication barriers, but I'm not sure how much it really helps when it comes to racism. It's so easy to talk with someone on the internet without knowing anything about their ethnic background. In fact I have no idea whether you're black, white, Jewish, Indian, whatever. So if I were a chauvinistic white supremacist, I could just pretend that everyone who writes thoughtful comments on HN is a white dude. This contrasts sharply with the real world, where you can't help noticing a person's gender and skin color before you ever exchange a word with him or her. The internet also helps people erect strong barriers that might otherwise have been too weak to sustain. Stormfront.org helps turn potential neo-Nazis into actual neo-Nazis, helps them unite despite their geographical dispersion, empowers them to publicly boast their bigotry, and worst of all, gives them a comfortable environment where they never have to confront any other opinion. The fragmentation of online communities keeps prejudices alive in the gaps.

by tinco 12y ago

sethsd 12y ago

Hey, thanks for comment. I'm a bit skeptical of the whole linguistic analysis thing, for various reasons. But I could be convinced otherwise (Also this would bias the analysis away from people who just register and lurk) ... Another thing I looked at was Facebook profiles. But this part was cut due to space. Here's what I found: Not surprisingly, most Stormfront users do not want to announce their white nationalism to the world. But about 100 Americans say on Facebook that they like Stormfront and are publicly searchable. This small, selected sample can offer suggestive clues to the membership of such sites. Are, for example, white nationalists unpopular and social pariahs? Nearly 80 percent of Stormfront fans had more than 100 Facebook friends. Nearly 60 percent had more than 200 friends. By comparison, a 2011 study found only half of Facebook users had more than 100 friends. Finally, another thing that was interesting was the percent of people who are atheists on the site. But I wasn't sure exactly what to compare that to, so that got cut too. - Seth

henrymercer 12y ago
"Why do some people feel this way?...And I can honestly offer the following answer: I have no idea." Do you actually not know? Or are you asking rhetorically? The reasons seem pretty obvious to me, not sure why they would be hard to figure out.
- sethsd 12y ago
  i meant that i don't know what the answer is. because the obvious answers that sound really good -- diversity, education, economic development -- may not work.
  - henrymercer 12y ago
    IMO, the Stromfront-type writings consist of about 30% legitimate grievance and perhaps 70% crackpottery, all portrayed in a grossly simplified and vulgar way. Part of the fuel for the crackpottery, is that the media/NYTimes in general ignore or downplay the legitimate grievances. Once you stop believing the NYTimes, well, what do you believe? You can believe anything a random site on the internet says. So one obvious answer, which you left out, is to actually address the legitimate grievances. The other obvious answer is censorship. Why don't we have a Stormfront TV channel? Because such a channel could never get a cable license, and if it did, it would get sued out of existence. Surely some lawsuit can be conjured up to shut down Stormfront, and make it impossible for other web hosts to host such sites? So either address the grievances and make peace or crush them underfoot and leave no doubt - those are always the two traditional ways to deal with hateful dissenters.
    - michaelochurch 12y ago
      30% legitimate grievance Legitimate grievance? How is blaming the world's problems on "the Jews" (as if they all operated as one) anything remotely resembling legitimate grievance? Poor, rural white Americans are getting a raw deal (thanks, in large part, to right-wing politicians they were misled into electing) but that's because poor, rural people everywhere are getting a bad deal these days. "Whites are an oppressed group" is complete idiocy and an indefensible position.
clarkm 12y ago
Eh, I don't think the number of Facebook friends is a meaningful comparison here. At least, not without additional controls. If a user takes the time to seek out such niche likes on Facebook, they also probably take the time to seek out friends to add. I know Facebook doesn't have the massive fake user problem that plagues Twitter, but still, I'd wager that fake profiles, inactive accounts, and users from countries with low Facebook usage skew the average significantly. You can't really tell if they are "social [media] pariahs" unless you compare them to a representative sample. You could control for the average number of likes, and compare that to the average number of friends. Or even better, you could compare them to several groups of users who like other fringe topics (from all parts of the political spectrum) and see if they're significant outliers. In fact, this is going on my idea list. :)
- sethsd 12y ago
  yea, that seems a better way to do it. and regardless you're dealing with such a small percentage of white nationalists and such a selected sample that it can only be suggestive. but i'm really not sure how else you could get any clues, so it seems worthwhile. -- seth
tinco 12y ago
Thanks a lot for making an account and taking part in the discussing, and my apologies for bashing your article a bit. Obviously the topic is very interesting and I'm very happy you made the article. I would actually be wary of the lurkers, I suppose there is a significant amount of people who are 'interested' in stormfront without actually sharing the belief who have accounts there. The Facebook statistic would be very interesting if it had been of the average Stormfront user. There's a chance the sort of person who has extreme opinions on their FB just has more friends, with only 100 out of 200.000 it's hard to tell. It's funny you are skeptical of the linguistic analysis thing while you opened the article with a quote from a girl who was impressed by the linguistic analysis of that NYT quiz ;) You can make this sort of analysis without any specific knowledge at all, a very generic n-gram analysis could give you anything from common phrases used by stormfront users to linking their identities across mediums (i.e. stormfront to twitter/facebook).

rdtsc 12y ago

> If we could locate the source of these ideas, perhaps there could be a way of battling it. That is interesting. It would be nice if there was a source for these ideas (well besides human nature) and if it was curable. We want to think these people a basically good but sick. Something happened to them and they became like this. If we could only prevent or even undo that. Could it be for example that by default people are racist and will automatically dislike others from different groups (social, religious, national, intellectual, professional). Hate of "others" is used for group cohesiveness. Maybe it isn't them that are "abnormal" but us, who maintain that we don't have these beliefs, biases and stereotypes (at least rationally). Wouldn't that be scary... Historically and geographically maybe instead of a sea of tolerance with island of hatred, it is the other way around. A sea of hatred and division with islands of tolerance. It is also interesting that we often attribute craziness to these people. I do it all the time. They are mentally sick, they are hallucinating etc etc. But if you read manifestos of killers and how these people behave towards each other, how they function in real life, you might find they are are disturbingly "normal". That that is really disturbing to me at least.

asuffield 12y ago
I don't think there's any innate racism, but people do tend to be hostile towards those who they see as "not of their own tribe". This view of the problem would suggest that racism is the result of people having a very narrow world-view, where they don't recognise many other people as being "like them". This would seem to be a solvable problem. We can break down communication barriers. The internet is already transforming the world in this way, and we've already come so far in the past few decades. Surely we can keep going, until nobody lives in a small corner of the world that's isolated from the rest of us.
- kijin 12y ago
  The internet does help break down communication barriers, but I'm not sure how much it really helps when it comes to racism. It's so easy to talk with someone on the internet without knowing anything about their ethnic background. In fact I have no idea whether you're black, white, Jewish, Indian, whatever. So if I were a chauvinistic white supremacist, I could just pretend that everyone who writes thoughtful comments on HN is a white dude. This contrasts sharply with the real world, where you can't help noticing a person's gender and skin color before you ever exchange a word with him or her. The internet also helps people erect strong barriers that might otherwise have been too weak to sustain. Stormfront.org helps turn potential neo-Nazis into actual neo-Nazis, helps them unite despite their geographical dispersion, empowers them to publicly boast their bigotry, and worst of all, gives them a comfortable environment where they never have to confront any other opinion. The fragmentation of online communities keeps prejudices alive in the gaps.