Headline Dec.23/ ''' HATEFULNESS & HOARDINGS '''

''' HATEFULNESS & HOARDINGS '''

FROM MARS  -THE MOTHER EARTH LOOKS very, very beautiful. And from our earth, only The World Students Society -walks the green carpet.

The world at large is turning a highly dangerous place with even the Americans planning to leave for the Moon. President Trump called on NASA to ramp up every effort to send people to deep space.

All of the above as China shuts Friendship bridge with North Korea. Chinese authorities, temporarily closed a border bridge that connects Dandong in China's Liaoning Province and Siinuju, North Korea.

*But working on Taking Sites away from web trolls*,  just so recently, the researchers generated a  list of hateful terms used on many forums, and tracked the use of those terms across Reddit.

They also compared the activity of users who posted  hateful terms before the bans with those users' activity after, to determine whether they had infiltrated other Reddit forums.     

The goal was to figure out what happened when these toxic communities were shutdown.

Did the amount of hateful language on Reddit decrease?  Did users of hateful forums migrate in other parts of the site? Did any of them change their behavior as a result of the ban?

The study found that, to a  extent,  the bans worked. Some users who posted offensive material on the forums that were shut down stooped using Reddit entirely.

Of those who continued to use the site, many migrated to other forums, but they did not bring significant amounts of toxic speech with them,  and the forums moved to-

Did not become more hateful as a result of their presence.

Overall, the users who stayed on Reddit after the bans took effect decreased their use of  hate speech  by more than 30 percent.

''By shutting down these echo chambers of hate, Reddit caused the people participating to either leave the site or dramatically change their linguistic behavior,'' the researchers write.

In an interview, two of the researchers who lead the study disclosed that although they had examined only Reddit, their findings might be applicable to-

Social networks like Facebook and Twitter, which tend to enforce their rules against individuals.

But the results of the study suggest that proactively shutting down nodes where hateful activity is concentrated may be more effective.

''Banning places where people congregate to engage in certain behaviors makes it harder for them to do so,'' said Esshwar Chandrasekharan, a doctoral student at  Georgia Tech and the study's lead author.

Eric Gilbert, an associate professor of the  University of Michigan and one of the researchers involved in the study, said that :

Reddit's approach worked because it had a clear set of targets. 

''They didn't ban people,'' he said. ''They didn't ban words. They banned the spaces where those words were likely to be written down.'' 

This is, of course, a small case study -two Reddit forum out of millions of online spaces where  antisocial behavior occurs -and methods for quantifying hate speech are still imperfect.

[This study's approach would have flagged one user chastising another for using a racial slur  as  hateful speech, if the slur were repeated as part of the chastising, for example].

The study also did not account for users who left Reddit altogether, some of whom may have continued to use hate speech elsewhere online..

Other online communities have had success with a broad-based approach in moderating hate speech.

DISCORD, a private chat-app, banned several large right-wing  political chat rooms from its platform this year, after some of the speech turned hateful and violent.

The bans did not entirely end hate speech  on Discord, but they did break up these communities and made it harder for trolls to find and talk with one another.

Social networks are increasingly feeling pressure to address hateful speech, not just for the sake of  users that in response to legal and political challenges.

The German authorities, for example, have threatened to  fine social networks, including Facebook and Twitter up to  50 million euros, or $53 million, for failing to remove harmful content  in a timely manner.

It might seem odd to focus on a space, rather than focus on a person or an act.

But as the Reddit example shows the broadcast approach is sometimes the right one.

With respectful dedication to the Research Scientists,  Parents, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society and Twitter-!E-WOW!   -the Ecosystem 2011:

''' Courting Honors '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless