Auditing Elon Musk's Impact on Hate Speech and Bots
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Edit: I could see how maybe someone could affiliate the word with hateful speech, but.. seems like a stretch, so I am curious what the rationale is. Maybe I'm missing something
Also, I've only ever seen "honk honk" used to reference "clown world", i.e. that the author thinks something societal or political is ridiculous, should this really be classified as hate speech? If so, makes me wonder whether the push to ban 'hate speech' and label it as extremely hazardous makes sense...
It's odd that you know what "honk honk" and the "clown world" meme without having any idea where they come from[0,1].
[0]https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Clown_World
[0]https://www.antihate.ca/_honk_honk_antisemitic_meme_before_c...
Incredible.
This is why half the country doesn't take accusations of "hate" seriously.
This particular dog whistle developed right out loud and lots of people still can't get it. It's amazing to see.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/clown-pepe-honk-honk-clown-wo...
This one does have a minimal standing usage by non-assholes, but there's not much ROI on differentiating, since "honk honk" isn't actionable or interesting criticism regardless of the political opinions of the speaker.
Apart from that, the actual concept seems slightly tenuous to me. Like, it seems like anyone could say something is a dogwhistle against some group and the only way to disprove it is to have people of said group publicly communicate that they don't associate the negative meaning of it. I assume this basically never happens because if you belong to a group that's told they're effected, you'd probably trust that. It seems that this would easily lead to fake dogwhistle proliferation and make the waters _very_ muddy. You could say this assists in the effecacy of the method.
However, having seen these memes be used all the time in many places and never once observing an actual hateful meme, i question why the average person would be concerned. Not only have i never seen honkler in the context of naziism, I've never seen a jewish person (or anyone up to this point) speaking out against its usage in such non nazi contexts. And the fact that there's so many people in these comments saying they never knew it was associated with naziism really makes me question if any of us should be concerned with its regular usage.
It just seems to me like an in group meme that a bunch of basement dwellers think is gonna convince people nazis are okay, which the average person will literally never see in any nazi context at all, and which a small group of people are very very upset about, seemingly believing the claims of the basement dwellers. Like, it could be literally any image, and the vast majority of people would never know the difference. How many people are actually behind effected by this? (Genuine question)
If i see a racist meme I'll call it out, but I'm going to go back to enjoying the parts of the internet that are capable of utilizing arbitrary images for fun.
The intent is to ridicule the left by having dupes get up in front of everyone and claim that a frog is a <the bad people> hate symbol, or that posting a square of black pixels demonstrates solidarity with anti-racism.
OR, that's what they want us to think, and the truth is that systematic countless postings of a frog is the precursor to <the bad people> world domination.
Regardless of what one might think the "correct interpretation" of the cartoon frog might be, actual real-world unapologetic white supremacists have associated themselves with that specific cartoon frog on national television, so the matter isn't limited to some bored pranksters on an image board.
There's quite a bit of substance behind the idea that it is problematic. (Already linked) But there will be nuance too.
There isn't substance, it's willful misinterpretation. The joke/hoax/op whatever you want to call it is -right there-. It isn't an attack on a racial or ethnic group, it's an attack on a political identity.
Is attacking liberals now considered "hate"?
They are telling you what they are doing and, as predicted, their opposition is willing to play along.
> Whether something qualifies or not will be a consensus in a given community, location, timeframe, etc.
I feel like this statement is pretty sophomoric.
Come on, there's lots of examples for each. Location: fag (UK/US), timeframe: queer (reappropriation), community: see Kendrick Lamar / Delaney controversy.
It is precisely this sort of blackwhite thinking that cast serious doubts on the validity of the author's work and really just makes them look like someone with an axe to grind... or, to put it another way: *HONK HONK*
I'm familiar with the "clown world" Twitter account, while I've never heard of any of the stuff on the wiki article, nor have I even used 4chan (other than once following an HN link about some IT thing).
So it's not surprising people wouldn't associate it with racism, or know it may have at one time been linked.
Because the context it's most often used in is racists claiming that someone is against white people when other races behaviour is mentioned or when other races are defended. Just search for it on Twitter for lots of examples. (Not linking specific examples, they don't deserve the traffic) You'll commonly find it used together with whitegenocide, antisemitism and other stupidity.
I would have expected more sophistication
As the presence of hate words does not guarantee that the text is hateful, we utilize the Perspective API, a family of models used for detecting toxic content, to further filter our data
The spike in March, 2022 coincides with the Canada convoy protests.
These sort of "studies" will hurt the credibility of researches longer term.
> While baseline tweets remain stable throughout the year (with an exception in early 2022 coinciding with the Canada convoy protests (Soucy 2022)), hateful tweets increase dramatically following Musk’s takeover.
So the claim is that total tweets increase in early 2022. Total tweets in Figure 2 is the top orange line. There's a noticable spike approximately in April and another one around August. (That's going by my faulty eyes, so their claim that it's in March makes sense to me.)
Was that caused by the trucker protests? No idea. But there are lots of interesting looking spikes in this chart.
> There's a noticable spike approximately in April and another one around August
> Was that caused by the trucker protests? No idea. But there are lots of interesting looking spikes in this chart.
Precisely. They simply marked two occasions they don't like. Might as well correlate with mercury being in retrograde.
What is the baseline? The mean? The year over year? Look at the numbers about 100+-50 "bad" tweets on a given month.. this isn't a serious effort, I am embarrassed on their behalf.
The chart seems reasonably clear to me.
They define baseline pretty clearly.
> To ensure fluctuations in hate speech are not reflective of fluctuations in overall user activity, we also sample a base- line set of tweets collected during the same time intervals. We used the keyword “thing,” taken from a set of the most commonly used words (Geoffrey Leech 2001).
OK. Why? A lot of things happened around then. Why mention the trucker convoy specifically?
> They define baseline pretty clearly.
How would a chart look like zoomed out to multiple years?
Presumably they believed it was the correct explanation for the anomaly in the chart?
> How would a chart look like zoomed out to multiple years?
That's an interesting question but it isn't the one this paper is written about, which is a specific event.
May I ask if you're seeking to understand this paper or to criticize it? Because it kinda feels like when your objections were addressed you came up with some more of them?
On what basis? How is it not an arbitrary event? There is absolutely nothing else in the paper about this event.
> May I ask if you're seeking to understand this paper or to criticize it? Because it kinda feels like when your objections were addressed you came up with some more of them?
Is that not what you're supposed to do with papers? Is this a study or marching orders?
It's not "marching orders", certainly. But reading to find how you might dismiss it is different from reading it critically. Like, it just strains my ability to believe you're reading the paper in good faith when you imply they haven't defined the term baseline, when it's simple to find the definition just by searching.
How so?
You're free to believe whatever you wish about me, only the actual issues raised are what matters, not the person raising them.
> It's not about the trucker convoy, no.
This is far more important than whether or not I personally rub you the wrong way. It means the paper is not legitimate.
> when it's simple to find the definition just by searching
I didn't just search, I actually read it. Stare at the paragraph again:
> Figure 2: Overall hate speech on Twitter increased after Elon Musk bought the platform. Number of hateful tweets sam- pled during each week in 2022, compared to a baseline of tweets collected during the same time period. The spike in March, 2022 coincides with the Canada convoy protests.
Look at the chart and this description and tell me you don't understand the problem here.
The problem isn't that I have any animus towards you (which I don't). Frankly the problem is that you're misrepresenting what's in the paper. If you say you've read it, you shouldn't be saying it's misleading and justifying that by things that are trivially checked by searching.
I'm doing my best to presume good faith and to presume that you weren't doing this intentionally. But you're not really giving me a lot to work with in that regard.
If you read it as well and deem this paper of good quality I suppose we can just agree to disagree and move on what can I say. I believe in following the truth wherever it may lead not fitting data to politically motivated conclusions which this work is very clearly doing, sad state of affairs.
Best of luck, stranger. See you around.
It does not matter to me in which direction the paper is politically slanted one iota, or what conclusions it so desperately seeks. The ends don't justify the means, sorry.
It matters very much to me that it isn't anything like science, and worse, that it masquerades. You can dance around this all you want.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Are you referring to something I posted in this thread as unsubstantive and flamebaity?
To be clear, nothing I wrote here was written intended as such.
Edit (since I can't reply): You've met me at a very strange time in my life, what can I say, I'll keep those notes in mind.
To be clear, nothing from this particular thread?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35563582 was unsubstantive flamebait.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35568205 was flamebait ("So... Schizophrenia?")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35567227 was particularly bad ("What on earth are you talking about?", "Have you been watching the dictator drunk again?", etc.)
You've been breaking the site guidelines in other places too (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35534129).