Politically-engaged Redditors tend to be more toxic – even in non-political subreddits::A new study links partisan activity on the Internet to widespread online toxicity, revealing that politically-engaged users exhibit uncivil behavior even in non-political discussions. The findings are based on an analysis of hundreds of millions of comments from over 6.3 million Reddit users.
Political topics are also the topics that are most strongly gamed by political actors using Persona Management software to make it seem like their opinion is in the majority. The idea that people who participate in things such as “forum sliding” aren’t toxic in their interactions is absurd, so we’re left with assuming a large number of these toxic accounts aren’t actually real people.
I’m not saying people deep into politics can’t be toxic. Plenty of them are, sure. However, it’s in the interest of people with political power (especially politicians with politically unpopular ideas) to make regular people not want to participate in politics. One way you do that is to make all political people seem unhinged, angry, and just terrible. People wonder why hardly anyone votes in elections, this kind of stuff is why, and it’s not on accident that these folks seem like the majority.
I’m fully convinced the majority of them are bots trying to make politics in general seem more toxic than it actually is to dissuade more people from even wanting to be involved. The intent is to drive political apathy.
Sources:
US government developing Persona Management software in 2011: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks
Eglin Air Force Base is most “Reddit Addicted City” in 2014: https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.html
One of many research papers on Persona Management and Influencing Social Networks from Eglin AFB: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf
Helpful Reading Materials:
The Gentleperson’s Guide To Forum Spies: https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm
100% agree with you. The worst part is the bots are getting better and better. I have a policy that you respond once to clarify and then walk away. These are for obvious bad actors, but now they’re seeming more and more like decent people with a flawed idea until you keep talking and realize it’s a bot. I don’t know how to counteract that.
I don’t know how to counteract that.
Simple. You don’t. When I’m debating, I’m usually not trying to convince the person I’m debating with. I’m trying to convince a disinterested third party who reads the exchange later.
I completely agree that it’s for the later people, it’s just a waste of time for me when it’s become a lengthy thread that nobody is going to read anyway.
The other thing they do is a bot attack of taking what people are saying, changing it, and then posting a lot of them to bury comments that they don’t want others to see. Not sure how to counteract that either.
How do you know they’re actually bots? 90% of the time, when I’m debating with someone who is passionately defending their position, they’ll at some point accuse me of being a bot or a shill. I also can’t recall any time I’ve debated someone and have been convinced they are a bot.
I’m just skeptical as it’s a convenient ad hominem.
To be totally honest with you, I wouldn’t for one second be surprised if the bots are programmed to accuse humans of being bots.
I have the same question. How do you distinguish an advanced enough bot from a genuinely dumb person?
Or “smart” person. There are almost certainly bots who espouse beliefs that align with yours too.
Up until a few weeks ago, it seemed these bots were mostly absent on Lemmy.
But recently, I have noticed they have arrived here, too.
I fully agree with your analysis.
In what way? Lemmy has been very political from the start. It arguably got less-so after the influx of redditors.
What are you seeing in the last month or so that makes you think there’s something more abnormal happening than usual?
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If “trying to find common ground and building from there” is normal human behavior, then normal behavior is in the minority these days. I haven’t had an in-person conversation with someone that disagrees with me that is even remotely attempting to find common ground in a very long time. It’s definitely not typical in my experience.
The funny thing is that I read this comment, and then looked at your post history completely expecting to find an obvious troll*, but no. You are consistently and commendably courteous in your disagreements, even as you collect an Olympian number of downvotes on what seem to be very innocuous statements.
*Every time someone says something along the lines of others not wanting to find commonality with them, I look at their post history. I am only rarely disappointed, lol
I do appreciate you saying that.
I try to be kind unless someone’s being an absolute turd, but I’m also trying to be less afraid to leave downvoted comments that I genuinely believe in. I kinda had a problem with deleting any heavily downvoted comments in my Reddit history, so Lemmy’s obfuscation of karma has been quite helpful in that regard, and it’s nice to see that some of those comments helped subvert your assumptions.
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I haven’t had an in-person conversation with someone that disagrees with me that is even remotely attempting to find common ground in a very long time.
It’s because it’s not only untrue, but almost the exact opposite of the truth. Humans tend to defend themselves when they find their beliefs threatened, not open themselves up.
This is the heart of a lot of lots of couples therapy: learning how to express your discontent without making it about your partner. If interested, read up on “I” statements. And we’re talking about people in committed relationships shutting themselves down to each other. Imagine how easy it is to do when you label the person as “the other team.”
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Argumentative accounts that personally attack and downvote, even though there is absolutely zero reason - there wasn’t even any disagreement on the main points, just anger on minor details.
That’s been here for a while. When I became a mod of c/politics some users stalked my profile to use it as proof my me being a terrible choice. They’re evidence was me not having a degree in political science, disagreeing with them on some issues, and having a complicated relationship with my mom. I said simply check the modlogs, and there haven’t been any complaints since.
Normal human behaviour is to try and find common ground and build from there.
This is wildly untrue. Even outside the confines of the Internet. People tend to circle the wagons when their beliefs are threatened, rather than try and find common ground. Which is why the way we debate ( and I’m debating now) is so ineffectual. You need to guide the person to come to the conclusion themselves (which is why the Socratic method is so widely respected), not tell them they are wrong and you are right and here’s why. It’s a low success method.
On the Internet, it’s even less true. Now I’m just a dehumanized bunch of words, not even an individual, so your mind is rushing to try and figure out to categorize me so you can make assumptions about me. This just compounds the above issues.
Your argument seems to rest on the claim that this is atypical human behavior. This is a false assumption, and thus conclusions based on it are faulty.
Intriguing. I don’t totally know what I think about this argument. A purposeful initiative to make politics toxic to get people to stop paying attention. It’s not one I had totally considered before. You think that’s really going on?
I have had many experiences with real people not on the internet that seem to fixate largely on politics and believe so fervently that they are right that they allow themselves to become toxic. I always thought it was a kind of inconsistent latent belief in utilitarianism combined with overconfidence.
I’m not saying those people don’t really exist, there are tons of them out there for sure, but we also have extensive evidence of governments doing this.
GCHQ in the UK had JTRIG using many forum disruption techniques.
There’s also the Five Eyes and how they use information sharing to essentially do an end-run around being able to spy on their own citizens. Technically, they’re not spying on their own citizens, a foreign nation is, they just so happen to have an agreement with that foreign nation to get info on their own citizens.
The US definitely engages in this kind of stuff on foreign nations as well. They tried to create a social media service for Cuba to influence Cuban politics and do information gathering.
Do either the UK or the US have to spy on their own citizens if they can rely on each other to run influence campaigns in each others countries? The US had to apologize to Angela Merkel for tapping her phone.
Israel has many different programs aimed at managing the PR of the state of Israel online. From paying college students to speak positively of Israel online to having “Think Tanks” use teams of people to influence Wikipedia.
We know that Hacking Team was selling their surveillance software to oppressive regimes, who were definitely using it to oppress the population. If they’re using these kind of tools, they’re using online disinformation tools as well.
So once again, there’s tons of real life absolute maniacs when it comes to politics. There’s also incentive for governments around the world to run influence campaigns for pennies on the dollar with digital tools in the digital world.
I think you’re right that there are people out there trying to manipulate and influence social media - I mean even that platforms themselves do this to a certain extent.
The idea that they purposely try to make it toxic to push the more intellectually-honest, emotionally-controlled people out of the conversation is the interesting part to me.
This particular facet feels less like intentional manipulation and more like a side-effect of our platforms and how they function.
Found a reddit mod with a dozen plus accounts. Made a new account to disagree with me, I pointed it out, and he denied it, but never used that account again.
It was probably just someone with no life, but I’d feel better about the world if he were being paid for it.
Are there any sources on this from the last decade?
Because I’m not sure if you noticed, but 2016 was kind of a big moment for politics and it triggered a lot of anger and controversy. Politics on social media are a very different thing now than they were in 2011/2012. Which is to say nothing of the well-documented uptick in foreign troll farms and manipulative content sorting, which may have been present in the early 2010s, but no where near the degree it was in the latter half, and still is today.
It’s also worth pointing out this uptick in “political toxicity” is mirrored in real life. You can’t blame the protests and increasingly violent altercations in real life on some psyops trying to make people not engage in politics.
And frankly…if the goal is to get people turned off from voting, they’re failing. Turn out has been going up.
Why, what happened in 2016? Did 46% of registered voters lose their goddamned minds and vote to put an entirely incompetent and demented convicted fraud and rapist sociopath who wears clown makeup in charge of the federal government or something? Why would that increase the fervor of fucking social fucking media for fuck’s sake jesus goddamned christ on a busted motherfucking crutch!!!
Sorry. You were saying?
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Two sides of the same coin, I barely see a difference, you both invoke hate and make the world worse.
Edit: This comment makes it clear the truth hurts. You should look at yourselves for what you really are.
Enlightened centrist horse shit
Ignorant peon exposed.
Clown take of the year, bot, congrats.
Hey look, a moron I get to block! Thank you for showing me your toxicity.
I feel our anger is justified when the right’s thought leaders tell their followers bigoted things they know to be false because it makes them money
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If you don’t understand one of those positions is objectively bad then that says a whole lot about you.
To be fair, while I agree with the viewpoint here, I don’t think there’s anything that’s objectively good or bad, just morals and beliefs in a society. I hope that’s what the other chap is getting at.
Something we consider to be 100% bad, like physically hitting a misbehaving child, may in fact be seen as acceptable to people from another society elsewhere in the world, or in a different time period.
It’s all just about perspective, good and bad are relative constructs.
I’m still gonna stick to being our societies version of good, fascists and xenophobes etc can go screw, but I’m under no illusion that my beliefs or morals are objectively immutably good.
Just food for thought is all!
Bigotry such as the transphobic rhetoric the OP of this thread was referencing is objectively bad. And I have zero interest in your attempt to defend child abuse.
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Aha! You are bad because of the way you think. The classic.
Yes, dumb too.
This but unironically
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I can understand someone feeling different than how they were born, it’s all fine and dandy.
But another species?
The litter boxes were emergency bathrooms for shooter lockdowns. Some clever villain tied it to “identify as” rhetoric, and politicians ran with new ammo to beat up their current punching bag.
It’s not a thing. The OP is giving an example of how their media misleads them and uses fear-mongering about differences in people to keep them in line.
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you don’t have to understand it, you just shouldn’t be a legislative genocidal asshole about it (not that that’s what you’re doing, but that’s what republicans seem to do to anything they think isn’t their slim sliver of a definition of “normal”)
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if you’re talking about furries, to my layman’s understanding of the subculture, that’s not how the vast majority of furries relate to themselves. From what I’ve seen, it’s not that they are the animal itself, they are the aspects of the animal, and those things are just little icons that they’re like boosting because they resonate with it. That said, there are at least a few people who DO feel that way, but I’m pretty sure they have a special category name (ferals? I think that’s what they’re called but I could be wrong, this is some deep lore I picked up years ago). If they do have that special name and I’m not just making that part up, then that implies that most furries do not feel that way about themselves.
But, acknowledging the existence of people like that at all does validate your question in my mind. I don’t really understand that extreme either. My only point is that most furries are what you would likely consider “normal”, they just have a particular hobby. It’s no more nefarious or odd than being into gender bending cosplay. You’re just taking something (yourself rather than an anime/video game character) and twisting it into something artistically different (a fursona instead of a cosplay outfit).
…no I did not intend to write that much defending furries but here we are lmao
hello, furry here.
Therians are people who believe they are an animal, they are technically separate i think but theres a big overlap. generally decent folks that get teased too much.
the big tell with the litter boxes thing is furries sell out some of the largest convention centers every year and extensively share photographs of the place. no litterboxes in sight.
Not even Rainfurrest?
Yeah just adult diapers there
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I’d imagine the same is true for Lemmy and politically engaged people (at least online) overall.
I’m not so sure. The study discusses specifically people who engage in partisan subreddits, which is not the same as being politically engaged. It also uses an AI to grade toxicity, which surely mischaracterizes many interactions.
For example, I have been in communities of a non-political nature, where political discussions occur. These are often about real issues that affect real people in the community, and yet there are people complaining about political content.
To complain about political content is, at best, a very privileged take, demonstrating that you are in a position where politics do not affect you much. At worst, it is actively hostile behavior with the goal of continuing the status quo and shutting down discourse. I would call most of these kinds of comments “toxic”, and yet the rhetoric is usually fine, so I doubt an AI would agree.
I’d say if you are politically engaged, the likelihood of you being in a political internet community is fairly high.
To complain about political content is, at best, a very privileged take, demonstrating that you are in a position where politics do not affect you much.
Could just be that they don’t care for politics in that community. Time and place for everything and it seems some feel the time and place for politics is everywhere all the time. It can be tiring. I don’t remember what year it was that pretty much every single place was talking about immigration politics. Important topic for sure but a meme community about funny road signs isn’t the place for heated soapboxing about closing down the border.
The thing is, what a politically engaged person thinks of as “politics” and what a disengaged one does probably has limited overlap. People probably aren’t bringing the Tories or the Republicans up in a D&D community, but bring up race portrayal or representation for disabled people and watch the sparks fly.
People probably aren’t bringing the Tories or the Republicans up in a D&D community, but bring up race portrayal or representation for disabled people and watch the sparks fly.
I wouldn’t bring up either up during a game. Unless I was prepared for some serious eye rolls and not being invited again lol.
And unfortunately people do bring up the former during all kinds of shit. Politic brains are wild.
People in a D&D subreddit aren’t playing D&D; they’re talking about playing D&D. Those are completely valid topics to bring up.
Depends on the commynity. Some just don’t want politics being brought into them. If it’s allowed/not forbidden then by all means.
Say you don’t like Linux here and tell me how many people call you a bootlicker lol
Or even better - “piracy is theft” or “ads keep YouTube free and are thus good.”
You don’t have to believe it. Just toss it up in a thread as a test and enjoy your next 12-36 hours.
Just saying things “as a test” is indistinguishable from defending it online. Things like body language, tone and intent do not come across as easily.
That being said toxic people exist everywhere on the internet it’s a flaw in our biology, we haven’t adapted to communicating this way yet.
That being said there’s a difference between a bad take like your above examples and condoning oppression and marginalization as some political groups have do.
One deserves to be defended vehemently.
Just saying things “as a test” is indistinguishable from defending it online.
Yes this is why it works as a test.
That being said there’s a difference between a bad take like your above examples
Only one of my statements is an opinion (I like a plug and play OS I don’t need to configure because I spend all my “customize” energy on my PC itself). The others are objective facts that make people sad.
This is what I mean by toxicity, and how I know for a fact the test will work
Testing people like that is not a great if your looking to dissect a viewpoint sounds more like being inflammatory, especially with your word choice.
Opinions can be bad takes. See > your examples.
I express exactly one opinion there, and it isn’t a “take” at all. “I don’t care for Linux” is not an inflammatory statement except to an absolute zealot.
Sorry guess I should have been more clear. All of your examples are opinions as in not demonstrably fact.
I don’t particularly mind any OS one way or the other I’ll use the best tool for the job. What I’m saying is a bad take are your proposed scenarios on piracy and ads which there’s no evidence to support, in fact there’s a lot to the opposite.
This would make what you said an opinion and by my point of view a “bad take”. Does that make you wrong to express them? No and I never said as much.
So I guess I just lost the thread on your point because all of those are just opinions. I was just using a colloquialism. Which brings me back to my point that usually when I see people get heated it’s because people are being bigoted.
The Linux thing, I doubt you’ll get toxic comments. You’ll probably get comments asking why to try to help, though that can always come off as demeaning. If you say Linux is bad, that’s different. You’ll likely get a lot of comments explaining why that isn’t true and that it’s a pretty ignorant take.
For the other comments, “piracy is theft” is, again, an objective statement, not a value judgement. Saying that is to say people who disagree are wrong. Same with the YouTube one. Change “good” to “useful” would probably be better way to say it.
There’s a difference between comments that judge other people (which will likely get a strong response) and comments that judge the subject. It’s something people frequently fail with. Even if it’s worded well, people will often take judging something they agree with as an attack on their character, which is also not useful. Humans aren’t logical beings.
Saying that is to say people who disagree are wrong.
They are wrong. People putting their own values (“I’m not a thief!”) into an objective statement are the people who are incorrect. You can justify piracy, but it is literally always a form of stealing. People here are very pro-piracy and, cool, so am I, but it’s stealing.
Point conceded on the YouTube thing tho, it’s inexcusable to be loose with my language in a post I’m using as an example.
Humans aren’t logical beings.
To my great dismay. I’d have avoided a lot of issues if I were more logical lol
Copying is not theft. When you steal, you leave one less left.
Yes I’ve gone around this little carousel many times with people trying to justify it for themselves. You don’t need to justify anything to me. I’m not your dad.
Like not paying for a haircut if the stylist didn’t have any customer at that time anyway. It’s a victimless crime!
(Btw I have a large Plex server. So yeah, I’m a hypocrite.)
That took labor. Copying bits doesn’t take labor. We don’t have people working in a bit mine.
I don’t totally disagree, but I don’t agree either. Saying there isn’t a semantic argument to be had is terribly ignorant. If you own a car and I take it, sure that’s theft. If you own a car and I take a picture of it, that isn’t theft. I created something new that didn’t effect the thing you own.
In the same way, creating a copy of bits of data does not effect the original item someone owns. It does not remove anything from them. If you’re not taking anything from them, how can it be theft? Theft requires something to be taken.
I have near-zero interest in this conversation, but one can absolutely steal a service. You’re taking from them because to consume the product you were expected to pay, and their entire infrastructure revolves around that.
How you feel about it is your business, but it is very cut and dry.
Sure, but it’s a product not a service.
It’s not as cut and dry as you seem to think. If it is cut and dry, I’d say it’s to the opposite of your opinion, but I don’t think it is.
Why limit online? Someone got into a shouting match with me because I didn’t agree with what fox news told him. When I realized what he had dragged me into, I walked away.
Because toxicity tends to falter in reality. Not to say there is no toxicity offline, there absolutely is. But you’ll find most of the toxic people have small dog syndrome. They’re all bark until they are face to face with someone. Excluding mob mentality of course.
As is on Reddit, the number of non-political posts with top level comments slandering republicans, seemingly totally off topic, is disappointing. I’m not American, so I don’t understand why so many conversations are simply “republican bad”. It seems obsessive.
Because republican politicians what to limit the freedoms of other people. Many republican voters don’t, but they vote for “their side” anyway. Do I need to respect the republican voter that’s personally tolerant, but still votes for intolerance?
Because conservative bs affects almost everything in our lives. Not pointing it out just enables it to keep happening.
See also: hexbear, lemmygrad.
See also: lemmy.world
No! We are the exception to all the rules. You dingus!!1!
Seriously I see so much worse coming from those accounts
AkA Chappo Trap House. I’ve never received so much hate from a community (expept on the_donald maybe). My crime? I think South Park is fun.
True
Cancer
Far right spaces in general.
inb4 hexbear and lemmygrad are far left
They are not. Tankies are far right.
Tankies are far left authoritarians. The left/right spectrum refers primarily to economics.
There are political traditions that see the left/right spectrum as a “How hierarchical do you think society should be” question, where being sexist or intolerant of LGBT would be inherently right-wing because they’re positions that are advocating for forms of social hierarchies, and therefore would claim that an anarcho-capitalist, even if still right-leaning, is much less right-leaning than a nazi.
But where is the basis for defining it that way?
I think a more clear and commonly excepted interpretation would be basically more collectivist vs more individualistic. The issue with that for some people is that would make Nazism left wing, and nobody wants the bad guys on their side.
It matches the historical usage of the terms. As far as I can tell the definition has barely changed in modern times; a lot of people have just tried to redefine them based on their own misunderstanding.
Tankies aren’t leftists. They defend genocidal and authoritarian regimes, which are inherently right wing.
which are inherently right wing.
Why?
Tankies are leftist because the oppose private property and favor the state controlling the means of production rather than individuals or corporations.
You’re confusing authoritarian communism with social democracy and anarchism. Stalin was a leftist, he was also genocidal and authoritarian.
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What does right wing mean to you?
What about left wing?
congratulations on instigating a semantics argument
definitions are SO fun to disagree over!
no
Authoritarianism and enforced heirarchical structures (as well as support for such regimes) are very much a right-wing philosophy. They also espouse the same “both sides” philosophy that conservatives push (which is a justification for maintaining the status quo, and another right-wing position.)
Doing my best to change this. I am extremely toxic without engaging in political behavior.
The first step is knowing there is a problem. Kudos.
Doing the lord’s work.🙏
I’m similar, I wouldn’t say I’m very toxic but I’m like stressed and determined in regular conversations. Struggling to just have friendly chats without being a know it all prick
This sounds like the textbook definition of a collider. Meaning that being toxic is the likely “root cause” and that toxic people are more likely to engage in political discourse (because it’s likely going to be toxic anyways? Idk) and they are more likely to comment toxic stuff in general.
I haven’t heard of a collider in that context before. Could you mean a confounder?
it’s not only that, remember the point of news articles is to make engagement too and one tactic is to fuel people with rage, even by the means of fake news, and given the internet anonymity, u get anger fueled keyboard warriors
Good points, add to that troll farms and bots
In a turn of events that comes as a surprise to precisely zero Reddit users…
I think it’s the same here on Lenny, ik because I’m one :(
Right! Big surprise, politically engaged people are generally angrier. And angry people can be a bit of a dick.
That all checks out…
Politics leads to stress, stress leads to anger, anger leads to people saying “KYS, fascists, or I’ll do it for you.”
Kys?
“Kiss yourself”. Or maybe something similar, but more violent.
Kiss yourself
Krill Yesterday Software
Kentucky Yeeted Salmon
I’m political as fuck.¹ While I try not to be toxic, I will sometimes call out aberrant opinions or counterfactual assumptions when I see them and that can lead to toxic exchanges.
So, yeah, I think the virtue of having strong opinions about things controversial is going to inspire heated exchanges more frequently.
¹ Sex in the US is very political right now.
I will sometimes call out aberrant opinions or counterfactual assumptions when I see them
But why though? You’re not going to change anybody mind online.
Leaving harmful public opinions unchallenged presents the illusion of widespread agreement.
You’re also arguing for the audience, not necessarily the person you’re arguing with.
How?
Maybe you don’t change them, but they shouldn’t get a free pass and be the only voice present.
Because people other than the two arguing read that and learn things. If someone states factually wrong or hurtful information about, say, trans people, I would rather they be corrected than someone think that trans people are anything other than human beings being human beings from that prior comment.
OK this to me is the perfect example. You say trans people are human. (a sentiment which i agree with BTW). How has you arguing with someone online changed ANY off the current anti trans bills out there?
Instead of arguing online and accomplishing nothing maybe instead you should be doing real work in the real work to stop that from happening.
But no, people will bitch and complain online, and then throw there hands up in the air and say “well at least I tried.” when nothing changes.
So, are you suggesting that people aren’t allowed to complain about things, are you suggesting that complaining about things cannot be done in tandom with works that better the lives of trans, or are you suggesting that people that actually want trans people to have better lives don’t get to complain about things? Because every one of those implications are dumb as shit, especially if you have any historical knowledge of civil rights movements.
No, instead you’ve taken a stance historically used to oppress civil rights movements, using a false dilemma to essentially proport that one cannot talk about the issue because that is wasting time not doing some unknown thing about it.
And by virtue of your own post, why are you arguing with people about people arguing instead of helping trans people get the rights they deserve?
why are you arguing with people about people arguing instead of helping trans people get the rights they deserve?
I’m not arguing. I’m responding.
Definitionally, you argued.
You never changed your mind because of something you read online?
I’ve never had someone who is arguing with me on the internet change my mind.
Have any of your views changed as you learned new things?
Of course, but some keyboard warrior shouting at me in the comments never has.
My experience has been that people on the Internet don’t try to teach you new things. They just attack your person, make unsubstantiated claims, or make overly broad references like “go read a book.” Even when you just ask questions without making any claims of your own, they will assume that you’re implying some disagreement with them instead of taking the question at face value. It’s extremely frustrating.
Yes. A lot of folk are unfamiliar with critical thinking processes, and are glad to adhere to positions that affirm their base prejudices. Especially when FOX News or OAN main a broadcast itinerary of affirming culture-war rhetoric. Curiously no one pretends FOX or OAN are trustworthy sources, even for uncontroversial news stories.
But that isn’t everybody on the internet, and I think the dialog is improved by those willing to counter assertions contrary to facts, and generalizations based on stereotypes and hate rhetoric. We’re not just arguing with a frightened bigot, but telling every marginalized soul reading they are seen, and they are valid.
And yes, it can be extremely frustrating given we only see resistance to the end of every exchange. We never see the moment of revelation from resistance to doubt from apathy to empathy. The human brain takes time to change its mind, to notice the leopard bites in nearby faces, to see how justifications are dangerous when applied to people they actually care about. We all have a mother in Hackensack, New Jersey.
Yes, I did not mean to give the impression that it is everybody on the internet. There has even been a couple of times after arguing for a while that people have come off the spell and literally said something like “I thought you were just a troll, I didn’t understand you were asking the question genuinely”. But these are exceptions, unfortunately. I wish good faith was the norm.
Open-minded people learn and change their opinion when presented with facts and discussions
The key words there are “open minded.”
The person one responds to isn’t always the audience for the response.
When people are toxic to dissenters online they don’t think they’re open minded people
Really curious about the tool they used to quantify “toxicity/disruptive” comments. My initial suspicion would be that political commentary, regardless of human-perceived toxicity, might be biased toward “toxic” by an automated sentiment analysis.
In short: I am suspicious that automated tooling exists to reliably distinguish between toxic and non-toxic political discourse.
We also have to deal with the fact that toxicity has become an almost meaningless label. The way we seem to apply it now, feels like we’d say there was a lot of “toxicity” around the time of the Civil Rights Movement, too. Or even the Civil War.
We’ve conflated “angry, hateful, bitter, disruptive, belittling” with “caring enough to get upset”. There’s been study after study trying to blame social media for the rise in “political toxicity”, and every last single one of them seems to want to sweetly ignore the context of the moment in time we’re living in.
People are acting volatile because there are a lot of volatile events happening that directly affect people’s lives. And all these high-minded discussions about how people online are so mean and rude, or how people don’t listen to each other anymore, consistently sidestep that very crucial piece of context.
So I ask, what do we mean by “toxic”? Because I have a strong feeling a good deal of women were being real “toxic” on June 24 2022. Why is the story not about why? And why does that deserve to be grouped in with the same toxicity comes from the people responsible?
I think you’re onto something saying toxic is a pretty unspecific term to use when talking about such things. Maybe it would be a better conversation to ask: when do the ends justify the means?
I’ll even step the conversation back a hot second to: do the means even result in the desired ends?
I’d argue (supported by every study ever done on the subject), that it doesn’t. The issue isn’t that you haven’t called your MAGA uncle a hillbilly redneck enough. No matter how many times you get called a woke liberal snowflake, I don’t think you’re going to genuinely re-think your position on building a wall.
If there IS an amount of verbal rage that could turn you into a MAGA, then by all means, disregard.
But… If there isn’t, and you genuinely care about changing outcomes, then I strongly challenge people to consider if “the ends justify the means” is predicated on an earlier faulty assumption that the means even generate the ends at all.
Agreed. Always a good thought to have when one is considering going down that road. Is the future predictable enough to really expect that particular end?
I agree that I’ve heard a lot of the same studies. I wonder though about the nudge and shame effects however. By this I mean, we’re pretty sure peer pressure is a thing (or at least I haven’t heard of anyone disputing that in recent research). I’ve seen self-censorship and studies that seem to also show that works.
I don’t know if the world would be better overall if we went back to 1990s levels of people not taking conspiracy theories seriously, and it being a negative view from “the average person” if you were ranting that the earth was flat. That happened somehow - those were tamped down, and I’d argue it’s plausible that it was basically peer pressure.
The means might well not be to convince the MAGA uncle, but to influence his kids, your kids, and the rest of the family to treat him as “the crazy uncle” rather than a person to emulate. Similarly, while you’ll never convince hardcore woke or MAGA people they’re wrong, you might affect the wider view of what’s “normal” for others watching. We’ve all seen the alternative of not engaging / leaving leave the space to become a self reinforcing echo chamber.
Maybe?
I guess at this point, I think we’ve probably long since surpassed a saturation point. For anyone who could be shamed into change have been. For everyone who may see someone being shamed, they’ve already seen it.
And, for the relatively small number of people who are perhaps reaching an age where it might matter, is there a concern that they won’t be exposed to it if one person (say you) don’t run that M.O?
Being a loud angry voice is so… Easy. People convince themselves that roasting libtards or trumpets is somehow critical. Like, as if it’s what is keeping the other side in check. As if the hatred isn’t just a self-sustaining perpetual hate machine.
I’m honestly not that interested in that line of thinking.
I’m more interested in trying to understand people like Daryl Davis. That looks HARD… But actually results in actual positive outcomes.
Anything I think is preferable to just maintaining the status quo, teetering on a knifes edge where the stakes keep getting higher but the stalemate of which way things will break remains. I think it’s too important to do the “easy” thing if the easy thing isn’t likely to result in significant positive change
Oh, online IDK, I think it’d be hard to miss, but people do still end up in echo chambers. At home or in person? Who’s doing the questioning matters too. What your friends think can matter a lot - if everyone is quiet because they don’t want to become “part of the problem”, no one is part of the solution. “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk”. I’d say that might well apply to at least try to “Friends don’t let friends fall down conspiracy theories”, “become neo-nazis”, etc.
But given Daryl Davis, maybe we agree - the in person is way more important than online. But I will also say a lot of people report finding likeminded people online (in multiple contexts like religion, LGBTQ+, nerds, whatever) helpful in realizing “not everyone is different from them” and “not everyone thinks one way”. And if only the loudest voices are left online, then we only see extremes. If representation matters, so does moderate representations.
I for sure agree that a discussion between friends is critical, especially the moment they start down a rabbit hole. I will admit to roasting a buddy who starts saying that “Jordan Peterson has some good points”. I guess I don’t consider that “Toxic” because of the pre-existing relationship and context? Maybe that’s unfair of me.
It’s an interesting thought. It really goes back to the question of trying to define toxicity.
Didn’t check for their specific approach, but this is a pretty standard metric in research.
It mostly boils down to either full mechanical turk (crowd source people to mark whether a post is positive or negative) or generating training data through one. I think there is a Michael Reeves video where he demonstrated this while analyzing /r/wallstreetbets posts since he needed to fully understand all the jargon/stupidity. But the idea is the same. You use humans to periodically update what words/phrases are negative and positive and then have a model train on those to extrapolate.
But there are plenty of training sets and even models out there for interpeting. The lesser ones will see “asshole” and assume negative and “awesome” and assume positive. But all the ones worth using at this point will use NLP to understand that “My asshole itches” is not a negative comment but “It would be awesome if you played in traffic” is very negative.
Also, I am realizing “mechanical turk” sounds like it probably is rooted in racism. Quick google doesn’t make it seem like it currently is, but apologies if that offends anyone and would love an alternative term.
I did read the source, and they’re using a Google AI classifier product, “perspective AI”, and even in the description of the product, it raised questions about its suitability.
At this point, most people in the space are pretty comfortable with the idea that AI models don’t eliminate bias, in fact it can amplify it.
I’m not saying “there is no way to attempt to measure toxicity”, just that based on the specific design of this study, if the measure of toxicity was biased against ANY political discussion, that would be an alternative explanation to the results.
You should read the article, if not the study itself. Its design smells suspiciously like that of an honours thesis as opposed to a grad project. Not just because of the AI… Mostly by the way they defined what constitutes participating in political discussion.
I mean, from a quick test of Perspective using their web page, it is not flagging some pretty strong political statements (mentions of late stage capitalism, calling republicans fascists, accusing Democrats of turning the country into a communist nanny state, etc) and none of them are getting flagged. Whereas, if I tell that text prompt to “go fuck your mother”, it understands that is toxic.
Because… this is kind of a solved problem. There are inherent biases but the goal of this is not to figure out which black man we can frame for a crime. It is to handle moderation. And overly strict moderation means less money. So while there likely is a bias, it does not seem to be an overly strong one and probably actually reflects the perceived reality.
Honestly? It sounds like you don’t like the outcome so you are effectively saying “fake news”.
Honestly? It sounds like you don’t like the outcome so you are effectively saying “fake news”.
You must understand the irony in me warning about being careful about drawing conclusions, and you arriving at this conclusion.
What about the outcome would I even find objectionable? The outcome didn’t find a difference between right and left? I DO personally believe that political discourse has gotten extremely toxic. I DO personally believe that people who are politically active ARE in generally more toxic in general conversation. Every single thing in this article confirms what I already believe to be true
I STILL DO NOT LIKE THE STUDY, because I do not believe that the design results in data that necessarily supports the conclusion. I’m not going to give this study a hall pass on rigor because I agree with its conclusion.
Edit:
Also, on the topic of politics and Perspective AI:
Baseline Sentence: “No X could ever be as good a X as Y” Base values: X=CEO Y=Henry Ford
Test Sentence 1: X = CEO Y=Donald Trump +41% more likely to be toxic than baseline
Test Sentence 2: X = CEO Y=Joe Biden +37% more likely to be toxic than baseline
Test Sentence 3: Y = President Y=Henry Ford +61% more likely to be toxic than baseline
Test Sentence 4: X = President Y = Joe Biden +94% more likely to be toxic than baseline
Test Sentence 5: X = President Y = Donald Trump +102% more likely to be toxic than baseline
I gotta be honest with you: my results do not disprove my hypothesis that the system is intrinsically biased to skew any political sentences along the “Toxic” axis
I think it’s the other way round – expressive people are more likely to have strong political opinions
I like to argue with people about politics. The internet is the safest place to do so.
I found myself becoming a lot more toxic the past few weeks, but the carpet bombing of Gaza has gotten me exceptionally angry. A lot of Zionist content is deliberately false and provocative. Not an excuse though.
No shit?
If you are discussing the exploitation of labor and people are bitching and moaning that “lazy devs” are taking too long to release a patch, you aren’t going to grin and say how awesome of a burn that was on those losers who just got purged in a layoff. Because social and political issues permeate everything we do. Hell, we have people who are insisting that one of the biggest social media platforms on the planet re-platforming alex jones is “not tech news”.
Which gets to the other aspect. Reddit, and Lemmy, has a tendency to never consider the source of a problem. Going back to the lazy devs example: Most moderators have zero issue with “This is trivial to implement and they are wasting their time making trailers or adding new skins”. It doesn’t violate any rules (and, even if it does, you can’t gather that from just the single comment). But when someone points out how toxic that narrative is? Suddenly this becomes a flame war (because nobody can accept they might not be perfect) and the entire branch gets nuked… except that initial lazy devs commentary is still there.
Sometimes that is intentional by the moderators (the lemmy.world 3d printing board has some good examples of that…). Mostly it is just because… being a moderator sucks and it is rare that a burst of traffic doesn’t involve a disproportionate burst of flaming and trolling. So suddenly they are inundated with angry people from all around whereas last week they had just a few porn posts a day.
But pretty much all of this is an extension of “tone policing”. Someone saying the world would be a better place if you and everyone like you were executed or enslaved? Better be careful how you respond. If you don’t smile enough, then YOU are the problem. So lighten up and learn that both sides have a point and maybe you should be the bigger person and only breathe 20% of the day instead of 90%.
Counterpoint: Violently unhinged MAGAts who literally make worshipping Trump and “owning the libz” their entire personality.
I’m not saying you’re not correct (you are), but I’m saying there’s other types of political toxicity out there.
I’m not sure how you got from devs being laid off and delayed patches to executions?
In other news, water is wet.
