[HN Gopher] The Psychology of Online Political Hostility
___________________________________________________________________
The Psychology of Online Political Hostility
Author : IAmEveryone
Score : 80 points
Date : 2021-08-28 08:21 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (psyarxiv.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (psyarxiv.com)
| steve76 wrote:
| So this is version 1 of the research. It reads to me like they
| are covering for social media. No regulations please:
|
| >In sum, these analyses suggest that people do not engage in
| online political hostility by accident. Online political
| hostility reflects deliberate intentions to be hostile, formed by
| individuals who are hostile whether they engage with others
| online or offline and who seek out the possibility of being
| hostile in both online and offline contexts. In the large
| discussion networks formed online, people are much more likely to
| observe the actions of such individuals, whereas their actions
| are more private in offline settings. One potential implication
| of this argument is that the online contexts have provided people
| with a more accurate - and not more biased - understanding of
| just how contentious political topics are for some.
|
| And this is the latest version, version 4. It reads like they
| want a professional class of trained social media moderators:
|
| >These results imply that policies against hostility should seek
| to reduce the connectivity of hostile individuals, for example,by
| decreasing the visibility of the content they produce or
| increasing the possibility of enforcing legal actions against
| illegal behavior(Haidt and Rose-Stockwell 2019). Of course, these
| policies need to be finely balanced in order to not curtail the
| freedom of expression.
|
| >Furthermore, our findings show that norms of civility are
| somewhat weaker online than offline, and continued exposure to
| hostile messages may increase this gap, potentially propelling
| more hostility through a vicious cycle(Brady et al. 2021).
|
| >Consequently, our research is consistent with prior findings
| that interventions strengthening norms or highlighting norm-
| violations can reduce hostility(Matias 2019; Siegel and Badaan
| 2020). At the same time, it is relevant to highlight the danger
| in encouraging users to set and to police norms of civility, as
| this may ignite novel forms of hostility about appropriateness
| and could undermine goals of improving the general tone of online
| discussions. From this perspective, public discourse should
| inform the setting of norms, but third-party referees -such as
| platform policies or trained moderators-would be mainly
| responsible for promoting and enforcing them in specific
| discussion networks.
|
| Are you allowed to do that? Same exact results, but completely
| different outcome and instructions on what to do next.
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related, though the headline is terrible:
|
| _Online Trolls Just Assholes All the Time, Study Finds_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28334551 - Aug 2021 (27
| comments)
| exo-pla-net wrote:
| If you scroll down, you can download the pdf to make it more
| readable on mobile.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| People spouting things online, would never say them in real life,
| for fear of getting punched in the face. Its interesting to me
| that the threat of violence is a useful deterrent in civilized
| society. Its almost like a paradox. That some underlying threat
| of violence is what causes us to respect each other in real life
| to some degree. Perhaps a keyboard that zaps stupid social media
| users fingers would be a useful deterrent. If it hasn't been
| invented yet, I'm claiming patent.
| watwut wrote:
| Or maybe, the premise is wrong. If fact, those assholes in real
| life would not be punched into face. They would be cut off and
| avoided.
| francoisdevlin wrote:
| I think the fine doctors over at penny arcade documented this
| earlier....
|
| https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| I'm very confused, because the abstract actually says the
| complete opposite. It states that fuckwads online also tend to
| be fuckwads offline!
| sokoloff wrote:
| Seeing some people whom I knew well offline first and now
| interact with mostly online (typically schoolmates), it seems
| like their offline acidity is around lemon juice and their
| online acidity is 6 to 12 molar HCl.
|
| It's simultaneously correct to describe them as being "more
| acidic" online, but practically, the penny arcade cartoon
| seems to fit better.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| I understand what the general argument is. I'm saying it's
| incongruous with the actual study presented here, which
| posits that people who are acidic online are also similarly
| acidic offline in political discourse.
|
| (It seems unintuitive to me, because I have similar
| experiences to you! But I'm wondering if my resistance
| personally to the concept is due to bias...)
| alexashka wrote:
| They have it backwards.
|
| Most people _are_ fuckwads that have to pretend they are human
| beings out in public due to culture.
|
| Anonymity removes that pressure.
| chooseaname wrote:
| Politicians don't have anonymity and yet we see plenty of
| fuckwad politicians.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| I've heard that as an explanation for _why_ we have so many
| fuckwad politicians. Only the most shameless will tend to
| volunteer themselves for such a hostile career path. Normal
| people don 't want it.
| fragmede wrote:
| This seemed true back in 2004 when it was originally posted,
| but since then Facebook and YouTube have both pursued real name
| policies (at one point or other) but that doesn't seem to have
| fixed it. Eg Anti-vaxxers have little qualms on having their
| names attached to their opinions.
|
| If online discourse is to evolve, merely linking to an
| irrelevant post from 16 years ago, being presented as gospel,
| would make for a good case study on why it hasn't evolved.
| jameal wrote:
| The study is looking specifically at hostility in the context
| of political discussions, not just general internet
| misbehavior.
|
| In any case, The Penny Arcade comic seems to depict the
| mismatch hypothesis which the study found little evidence to
| support:
|
| > Overall, however, we found little evidence that mismatch-
| induced processes underlie the hostility gap. We found that
| people are not more hostile online than offline; ...
|
| And while they're not ruling out the mismatch hypothesis
| entirely, they do offer an alternative which they call the
| connectivity hypothesis:
|
| > ...Thus, our findings suggest that the feeling that online
| interactions are much more hostile than offline interactions
| emerges because hostile individuals-especially those high in
| status-driven risk taking -have a significantly larger reach
| online; they can more easily identify targets and their
| behavior is more broadly visible.
| noduerme wrote:
| I don't know if anyone else felt this, but I've experienced a
| real sense of calm and relief in the past couple days since
| reading an analysis of this paper.
|
| I'm not on social media (except Nextdoor - ugh), but sometimes I
| find it hard to not challenge people who say really noxious
| things in online comments. I was brought up in a family of legal
| scholars who approach political and interpersonal debate with
| facts, proofs, and Socratic reasoning. And so I fall into arguing
| with online trolls who seem to sense that they can get me worked
| up just by their sheer unwillingness to engage in civil,
| reasonable conversation.
|
| My takeaway from this paper was that it's not the online
| environment causing otherwise-normal people to act as trolls.
| It's that online trolls drown out more reasonable voices, and
| that they're not nice people in real life. They meet the
| definition of psychopaths. They are not people who can be swayed
| by logic or nuance IRL any more than they could be online.
| They're likely not even interested in whatever falsehoods they're
| spouting other than trying to get satisfaction by pushing
| people's buttons. In other words, if you ran into them at a bar,
| you wouldn't have a conversation with them. You wouldn't even go
| to the places they go. You wouldn't have them over to dinner and
| try to have a civil discussion. They are too busy at home beating
| their wives or whatever it is psychotic people do when they're
| not trolling online.
|
| And this gave me a sense of relief, because now I feel I can
| ignore them better. I can think of them as people like my SO's
| abusive father, or my abusive half-brother. People you just don't
| speak to and don't engage because you won't give them the
| satisfaction. I know "don't feed the trolls" is nothing new, per
| se, but somehow it's something I've been good at IRL and bad at
| online for most of my life. Because online I give people the
| benefit of the doubt that they're more than what they appear to
| be at first blush. This essentially proves that they are one-to-
| one the same people you wouldn't have anything to do with in real
| life, and for me that's a powerful reason to just walk away and
| ignore them.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > [...]hostile political discussions are the result of status-
| driven individuals who are drawn to politics and are equally
| hostile both online and offline. Finally, we offer initial
| evidence that online discussions feel more hostile, in part,
| because the behavior of such individuals is more visible than
| offline.
|
| Not only more visible, but more out of context. The identical
| political conversation between someone and their parent, for
| example, in the context of a loving family relationship, will be
| remembered differently than that discussion with a faceless
| online swarm. You're forced to think of your parent as a person,
| whereas anonymous opposition is easy to dehumanize. And if you're
| a middle-class PMC, you can just fall into thinking of the
| internet as a mob of subhuman lumpen morons out for bloodsport
| and seeing every interaction in which people vehemently disagree
| with you as further evidence of that.
|
| ----
|
| Edit: The fixation on online culture as the source of strife from
| people annoys me. I know plenty of mean, aggressive people in
| real life. I know very few on the internet - because _I know
| fewer people online than I do in real life._ _Seeing_ people you
| don 't know be mean online and thinking that online life is
| meaner is like watching the local news and concluding that
| everyone but you, your family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers
| are murderers.
| IAmEveryone wrote:
| The question is if the ability of the hateful to find
| communities of like-unminded people allows them to persist,
| organize, and affect the lives of the objects of their hatred
| in ways that were less likely than before.
|
| I'm not sure what the answer is, tbh. I certainly doubt
| something like the Trump presidency would have been -possible,
| or as likely, before the internet. Organizations from ISIS to
| "proud boys" certainly profit from the ability to proselytize
| on YouTube. But, at the same time, the general trend of the arc
| of history bending towards justice appears to be still alive,
| to some degree.
| jcims wrote:
| >... hateful ... like-unminded ...
|
| Do you see these folks you're talking about as fully human? I
| see this kind of classification a lot, as though 'they' are
| just a swarm of zombie NPCs following some simplistic
| algorithm.
| s5300 wrote:
| > fully human
|
| This is a bad argument.
|
| Perhaps try "humans capable of living in and contributing
| to a civilized and prosperous modern society"
|
| and, unfortunately, I think you'll often find the answer is
| that they are not, nor do they wish to exist in one. They
| want power and total control over, hilariously, the lives
| of others who simply want to live in and contribute to a
| civilized and prosperous modern society.
|
| They're hateful, violent, and time and time again show that
| they're incapable of coexisting with others who don't share
| their same close-minded fantastical views.
| exporectomy wrote:
| > "humans capable of living in and contributing to a
| civilized and prosperous modern society"
|
| You're doing a common technique of insulting someone's
| ability when really you mean that they hurt you or you
| hate them for some reason.
|
| Isolated self-sufficient people, severely disabled
| people, children with terminal illnesses, very old
| people, etc. all meet your definition. Do you really have
| something against people for not being born with the
| ability to do valuable work for others? I doubt it.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| > They want power and total control over, hilariously,
| the lives of others who simply want to live in and
| contribute to a civilized and prosperous modern society.
|
| > They're hateful, violent, and time and time again show
| that they're incapable of coexisting with others who
| don't share their same close-minded fantastical views.
|
| You accurately described today's US Democrats/Marxists.
| Racist, intolerant, violent, and as we're seeing now in
| Afghanistan, incompetent.
|
| Was that your intention?
| jcims wrote:
| In the context of the article I'll replay how I processed
| your reply. > fully human This
| is a bad argument.
|
| My immediate reaction was 'it was a question, not an
| argument' and got a little stab of cortisol from my
| endocrine system. The 'bad' adjective could be
| interpreted as ignorant/incomplete or malicious, but
| usually when I see folks invoke the whole 'bad X'
| question, its really just a play to reframe the
| discussion or ignore some nuance of it.
|
| So it didn't start off well, and I immediately felt that
| the comment was either reactionary or using my comment as
| a trampoline to project some tangential point.
| Perhaps try "humans capable of living in and contributing
| to a civilized and prosperous modern society"
|
| So this led me to believe we're going down the
| 'reframing' road, as the comment is adding a bunch of
| conditions to the term 'human'. This, to me, is simply a
| way to filter out humans that don't meet those
| conditions. Particularly when the comment includes
| 'capable', which clearly creates two classes of human
| from a political standpoint, one of which should be
| engaged with because they are capable of being
| influenced, the other is simply livestock.
| and, unfortunately, I think you'll often find the answer
| is that they are not, nor do they wish to exist
| in one. They want power and total control over,
| hilariously, the lives of others who simply want
| to live in and contribute to a civilized and prosperous
| modern society.
|
| The comment kind of lost me here, to be honest. Clearly
| this could apply to any individual interested in
| amplifying their own political perspective.
| They're hateful, violent, and time and time again show
| that they're incapable of coexisting with others who
| don't share their same close-minded fantastical views.
|
| I think I landed at this comment attempting to shift
| focus to extremists rather than the rank and file of any
| particular political persuasion. It's possible that
| connects back to the article because the extremists of
| just about any ilk are a) interested in amplifying their
| political perspective and b) are quite possibly more
| inclined to engage in sharp discourse on the internet.
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| >The question is if the ability of the hateful to find
| communities of like-unminded people allows them to persist,
| organize, and affect the lives of the objects of their hatred
| in ways that were less likely than before
|
| I suspect this is a serious factor. In the before-times, the
| ability of these people to meaningfully organize was hampered
| by their comparative rarity and geographical distribution.
| The consequences of those two factors created a damping
| effect: the majority of their social interactions were with
| non-extremists, giving them neither a chance to express
| extremism nor mutually reinforce their extreme beliefs.
| bopbeepboop wrote:
| The problem with censoring is the bias you showed in your
| comment, with who you selected as examples.
|
| Eg, mentioning the Proud Boys, but not Antifa -- the violent
| street gang who committed billions in arson, murdered dozens,
| and is still pepper-spraying children in Portland parks. You
| picked the _smaller_ street gang, likely because you're
| politically aligned with the larger, more violent one.
|
| I don't disagree that many groups are "bad" -- but that
| doesn't mean I believe we can regulate that without the
| censorship being corrupted into something worse.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> I know fewer people online than I do in real life
|
| That sounds very, very strange to me. I know I'm the one that's
| weird here, but wow.
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| 1962 study: Subjects divided in two groups, both angered. The
| study cohort believed their frustrater had been harmed and
| experiences less emotional tension than the control group. Of
| note, the group who enjoyed hostility catharsis did not become
| friendlier.
|
| I don't think it's a shocking observation political hostility on
| all sides is often a strategy for self-care in the form of
| hostility catharsis.
|
| Along these lines, if Facebook, Twitter, etc. were sincerely
| interested in improving online discourse, they would jettison
| "fact checking" and censorship for additional content that
| focuses on the safety of the present moment, temporal
| perspective, breathing, visualization, humor & timeouts.
|
| Every one of those interventions are proven to work in many
| cases, do no harm, allow the free flow of ideas and where
| effective open doors for bridge building.
|
| Yeah, seems hokey... until you actually try these strategies and
| discover they provide tremendous relief.
|
| Study abstract: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1963-05053-001
| acituan wrote:
| > Along these lines, if Facebook, Twitter, etc. were sincerely
| interested in improving online discourse, they would jettison
| "fact checking" and censorship for additional content that
| focuses on the safety of the present moment, temporal
| perspective, breathing, visualization, humor & timeouts.
|
| Except those companies are in the business of emotional
| disregulation in the name of "engagement".
|
| Last thing I want is for them to have even more authority on
| the participants' emotional states. When not riled up through
| manipulation of what they see, most people have a good sense of
| how to be good to each other.
|
| The other problem is social media getting overrepresented in
| comparison to real world interactions in our lifetime of
| discourses. I want the full experience of the disagreeable
| other, ideally in a friend, so that we can hold the tension of
| disagreement with some love and beers. Textual/propositional
| discourse is a mere simulation of this, we're all stranger
| brains in vats spitting out argumentation in a truncated form
| of existence. Perception of being right overcomes the actual
| need for being right and being held in positive regard. We're
| here more to impress, and less to dialogue and cohere.
| kodah wrote:
| Is this paper exclusive to a certain website? I've had
| discussions with people of various political persuasions that
| are downright hostile on _this website_. If people on _this
| website_ with engagement mostly removed can 't control
| themselves, _who can?_
|
| I've looked through some of these people's profiles before
| and I've been shocked to find that in non-political
| discussions they're pretty normal. They're not _trolls_ per
| se, unless you threaten (using this loosely, such as
| believing in or having experiences counter to) something core
| to their identity or way of life.
|
| My takeaway, thus far, has been that without you being
| physically sat in front of someone they can't observe how
| something so close and dear to them could possibly hurt
| someone. They can't imagine that something that seems
| "righteous" could alienate people or _the wrong people_ if
| their purpose _was_ to alienate. They only see that through
| the various signals we can 't capture in a DOM or across
| HTTP.
| slumdev wrote:
| > they would jettison "fact checking" and censorship
|
| Telling someone their beliefs aren't valid is rude if they're
| preaching something like flat earth or "law of attraction" or
| Lysenkoism, but it's not the end of the world.
|
| However, telling someone their beliefs aren't valid when those
| beliefs are merely unpopular or inconvenient reduces the
| credibility of the "fact checker" and increases the hostility
| and insularism of the person with these beliefs.
|
| In early 2020, the fact checkers told us that anything less
| than an N95 mask doesn't work. The fact checkers of today tell
| us that any face mask prevents the transmission of the virus,
| and they've even come up with words like "anti-masker" to
| dehumanize people who question them or who merely adhere to
| their early 2020 statements.
|
| In mid-2020, the fact checkers told us that the lab leak theory
| was preposterous, and promoting it was a Facebook/Twitter
| excommunicable offense. Today, this idea is mainstream.
|
| In early 2021, the fact checkers told us that the vaccine stops
| the spread of the virus. In mid-2021, the fact checkers told us
| that the vaccine reduces symptom severity. Today, mainstream
| fact checkers are recognizing that vaccine immunity wanes and
| is ineffective against new variants.
|
| Fact checkers seem to be wrong more often than they're right.
| So why does the fact checker get to decide what I can post on
| Facebook and Twitter?
| stickyribs wrote:
| In your response to your last paragraph:
|
| It's a slippery slope and some fortune-telling to assume that
| Facebook and Twitter will not let you post based off
| potential incorrect facts. If anything, a caution or warning
| label regarding facts should offer the reader extra
| information. As MikeTheGreat has aptly highlighted, science
| is a self correcting paradigm that seeks to prove itself
| wrong. Old facts, tried and tested overtime, may seldom
| update but new and not well tested facts may evolve in due
| time.
|
| Also, the claim that fact checkers are wrong more than they
| are right is a non-sequiter. Because the prevailing truth at
| the time of fact checking is the most accurate based off the
| current body of evidence. And as stated in my point above,
| our understanding of the truth crystallizes over time.
| slumdev wrote:
| Truth doesn't evolve.
|
| What's true now was true a year ago, even if we didn't know
| it.
|
| This idea of evolving truth is a mealy-mouthed way of
| saying, "We were wrong."
| stickyribs wrote:
| I corrected my op to clear up ambiguity. What I meant was
| our understanding of "the truth" evolves and crystallizes
| over time. Not Truth itself (the truth I was referring to
| in my OP was our own truth about the truth). So, as we
| gather more data, revise our hypothesis, throw away wrong
| ideas and formulate new ones, we get a clearer picture.
| akomtu wrote:
| "Truth doesn't evolve" is a profound statement. Is it
| from Hermes? The downvotes on your comment reminded me of
| one well known historical figure who told not to give
| jewels to the crowd as they would get agitated, because
| of ignorance, and try to lynch you.
| nathias wrote:
| I'm glad to see another person with a long term memory, for
| some reason this is very rare online.
| kortex wrote:
| Speaking of fact checking, this whole post needs a _citation
| needed_. I don't recall fact checkers _ever_ say masks below
| N95 "doesn't work". There was a brief period where mask
| wearing wasn't recommended, in a possibly ill-suited ploy to
| prevent hoarding.
|
| I don't recall fact checkers ever saying the lab theory was
| "preposterous", only that it was unsupported by evidence at
| the time.
|
| I don't recall fact checkers ever saying the vaccine "stops"
| the virus spread, only that it dramatically reduces
| transmission. There was always concerns about variant escape
| from like, April 2020.
|
| Addition: Clearly, there is a disconnect between what I
| experienced "fact checkers" saying, and you, or others,
| experienced. Using the phrasing "fact checkers said X" is
| extremely veridical in tone, and opens the door for lots of
| clashing with anyone (such as myself) with differing
| observations.
|
| Also, when you say "fact checkers did X", are you speaking
| for _all_ fact checkers? Some? Which ones? It's an
| epistemological mine field.
|
| Addition 2, before I get nit-picked over the "masks don't
| work". OP's statement is:
|
| > In early 2020, the fact checkers told us that anything less
| than an N95 mask doesn't work. The fact checkers of today
| tell us that any face mask prevents the transmission of the
| virus...
|
| So I interpret "work" here to mean "prevent transmission of
| the virus." I remember extremely distinctly at the time the
| recommended guidance, because my aunt asked about whether she
| should wear a mask. I told her, as was guidance at the time,
| late Feb 2020, that a typical surgical mask would not
| dramatically reduce her risk of contracting COVID, she would
| need a respirator (N95), and at this point in time, unless
| you were high risk, this was probably overkill. Cases were
| rare enough that your best bet at the time was handwashing
| and social distancing. Then, two weeks later, around Mar 14,
| I told her "yeah actually you should be wearing a mask around
| others, even cloth ones, lest you be an asymptomatic
| carrier." What changed in that timeframe? The number of cases
| in the USA started skyrocketing, and we discovered that COVID
| can be asymptomatic in a large percent of cases, and has a
| long incubation period. New information was acquired, the
| recommendations changed. That's how all rational, informed
| decision making should work.
| mcguire wrote:
| As it turns out, I apparently don't interact with media
| employing fact checkers all that much. Apparently, I get
| stuff from the horse's mouth.
|
| " _I don 't recall fact checkers ever saying the lab theory
| was "preposterous", only that it was unsupported by
| evidence at the time._"
|
| As I recall, officials and experts were saying that the
| lab-leak theory was unsupported by evidence, while people
| were boycotting Chinese restaurants and attacking vaguely
| Asian looking people because they held "China" responsible
| for the pandemic.
|
| " _I don 't recall fact checkers ever saying the vaccine
| "stops" the virus spread, only that it dramatically reduces
| transmission. There was always concerns about variant
| escape from like, April 2020._"
|
| As I recall, experts have always been saying that the
| vaccines were very effective at preventing death and
| hospitalization, but did not eliminate the possibility of
| infection and if you were infected, it might still be
| possible to transmit the virus. And yes, the effectiveness
| of the vaccines against variants of the virus has always
| been a question.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.cdc.gov/coronavir
| u...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210326123341/https://www.cdc.
| g... Could someone provide a link to anyone saying anything
| else?
|
| (I've previously posted articles about the history of the
| evolving mask issue.)
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| I really don't think it's helpful to say "Fact checkers
| said X" without providing proof and context.
|
| Unsurprisingly it turns out that social media - platforms
| designed to promote aggressive argument for "engagement" -
| are a very bad way to distribute public health information.
| Or reputable factual information about anything at all.
|
| Reality-based audiences will try to select credible
| sources. But everyone else gets a diet of anger, fear,
| hearsay, misunderstandings, shock-value anecdotes, lies,
| and noise.
|
| I think it's unwise to ignore how much of an influence this
| has had on what's happening now.
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| I kinda feel like your post is an (implicit) argument in
| favor of the scientific method:
|
| 1. Form a hypothesis (i.e., our current best guess based on
| what we know, and what we think is going on).
|
| 2. Test the hypothesis (i.e., try it and see if it work :) )
|
| 3. Based on (2), go back and update our hypothesis
|
| I think it's both reasonable and good to change one's mind
| over time because you've seen new data / you're in a new
| situation.
| kortex wrote:
| I think also part of the problem is English semantics. The
| terms fact, myth, theory, evidence, research, etc., get
| thrown around everywhere when it comes to epistemology and
| peer discussion. They have different meanings in different
| contexts. People don't always speak with maximum precision.
| Take GP's comments of the form "Fact checkers said X". This
| is a hard stance. It also completely contradicts my
| experience. It would have been softened with "I remember
| fact checkers saying X" because that opens the door to the
| possibility their experience does not reflect the whole. A
| unique reality tunnel. But saying "X happened" opens the
| door for argumentative replies from anyone with a different
| experience.
|
| I'm guilty of this, many people do it, maybe even most
| people. It's easy to lapse into the subconscious mentality
| that your experience reflects universal experience.
| slumdev wrote:
| We all need to update our mental models if they don't match
| the reality we're presented with.
|
| What I reject is someone else's claiming the right to
| censor my comments or append a wrongthink warning to them.
| merpnderp wrote:
| Looks like jackalopes have flagged the parent, but I'm
| guessing they were referring to how politicized the "facts"
| were last year. When people were criticized for wearing
| masks, and laughed at for saying it was irresponsible to
| keep New York open and accuse Trump of "scare mongering"
| over the virus. People were kicked off social media for
| saying "conspiracy theories" which are considered facts
| today. Remember Biden and Harris saying no one should take
| vaccines that haven't gone through standard FDA approval
| process? Likely not since our "fact checkers" are horribly
| biased and couldn't care less about the scientific method.
| Wistar wrote:
| "When facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, Sir?"
|
| -- Attributed to Keynes, Churchill, and others with varying
| details but probably apocryphal.
| Stupulous wrote:
| People who believe in things like flat earth have already
| rejected argument from authority. Ostensibly, fact-checkers
| exist for the benefit of people who do trust experts but also
| would be convinced by a random facebook post. Maybe such
| people exist, but, like you say, in the 5 years (?) that
| fact-checkers have been implemented on social media, they've
| already overplayed their hand and can no longer be viewed as
| totally consistent with expert opinion. They are often used
| to manipulate political opinions and distribute propaganda.
|
| It's a little ironic. They probably introduced fact-checkers
| to avoid regulation, but in an ideal world I feel the most
| important regulation would be expressly to prevent big social
| media corporations from centrally controlling information
| like that.
|
| I don't think 'wrong more often than they're right' is
| accurate, we just hear about when they're wrong and not when
| they're right. I also want to say that 'ineffective' is the
| wrong word for vaccine's relationship to new variants. The
| vaccine still dramatically reduces spread, and almost always
| prevents hospitalization and death.
| stickyribs wrote:
| A related idea to your thought while reading your comment
| is that it appears that two groups of people arguing
| competing ideas don't agree on how to derive the truth; one
| being the scientific approach (bending over backwards to
| prove yourself wrong) and the other seeking through
| confirmation bias and both claiming victory.
| decremental wrote:
| There is a less popular to mention third group. The
| majority of people are midwits who are neither stupid
| enough to believe the truly ridiculous (flat earth), nor
| critical enough to think for themselves. They are the
| ones welcoming the tyranny our ruling class is only too
| happy to facilitate.
| exo-pla-net wrote:
| The purpose of fact-checking isn't to improve online discourse.
| It's to reduce public health crises, like vaccination
| hesitancy, and extremism based on falsehoods (e.g. countless
| false claims of ballot irregularities), leading to political
| violence. But in terms of reducing toxicity, your idea of
| introducing self-care interventions is great.
| nathias wrote:
| any sources on the effects of
|
| > content that focuses on the safety of the present moment,
| temporal perspective, breathing, visualization, humor &
| timeouts
| motohagiography wrote:
| How is the "hostility gap" in the paper not just what happens
| when you remove physical consequences from these people and
| people like them? The authors appear to do some free association
| with status seeking and threatening others as well, and I'd
| wonder whether there is a clearer way to present the ideas.
|
| Having met and known trolls personally in real life growing up
| online and working for ISPs in the 90s, to me they fell into a
| few categories. The most obvious one was the assorted personality
| disorders that were just really damaged goods. It was a blessing
| to the world they found the internet instead of preying on people
| in real life, which surely at least a few did. The ostensibly
| sane ones were a kind of henchmen to bullies who lacked the
| physicality and charisma of the bully they followed and instead
| could reify their cruelty and revenge fantasies online and get
| off on the attention.
|
| The final group was nihilistic political operators, who got into
| politics because having an opposition team is an outlet for an
| urge to be a piece of shit to others, and it's a kind of sport to
| them. You see them disrupting and derailing conversations with
| talking points, arbitrary racism and hostility to keep thoughtful
| people away from a controversial topic, and low effort comments.
| They worked up from activist groups to political party "rat f-er"
| operatives, and in a more successful life they might have been
| spies, prosecutors, or jail guards.
|
| From what I can tell about the trolls I met, I think they are
| trying to become something more contemptible than they already
| feel they are, as a way to reclaim their own shame and self-
| hatred by rebasing their identity on something can they control,
| instead of self-identifying by the life event that made them feel
| ashamed. There's nothing you could say that will make them feel
| worse than they already feel about themselves, and unless you are
| capable of delivering a level of psychological harm that is
| competitive to their personal peak negative experience, and only
| with internet arguments, anything you say just makes them feel
| stronger. This is how they thrive on the negativity. You just
| can't get drawn in.
|
| In terms of how this effects online discussion? I'd be concerned
| the paper has a bunch of policy prescriptions buried somewhere in
| it, and the solutions aren't in the domain of policy. It may be
| as simple as judiciously booting accounts that don't meet a bar
| instead of legalistic lowest common denominator rules for trolls
| to litigate against, and teaching young people that cruelty is an
| expression of need.
| cptnapalm wrote:
| Your comment about the removal of physical consequences
| reminded me of this quote from Robert E. Howard: "Civilized men
| are more discourteous than savages because they know they can
| be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general
| thing."
| watwut wrote:
| Reminder that this quote does not describes real world in the
| slightest. You have in fact polite unarmed non violent
| societies and rude as hell violent societies.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| There's a very general problem - social, political, economic,
| and media systems reward these bad actors instead of
| marginalising them.
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