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Comment by catiopatio | Hacker News Reader

> There are probably too few examples of people saying hateful things about christians/republicans/cisgendered/white people … from the internet

This seems likely to you?

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Seems more likely that fewer humans are labeling speech used to describe these groups as hateful.

Fewer humans or just those with access to the "filter"?

Reminds me of old Twitter again.

Here's an example, atheists[0] are considered less trust worthy than muslims in america. Christians absolutely have a privileged place in society.

[0]https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797615576473

Fox news spent an entire decade saying that Islam is a religion of hate and can only result in violence.

Find me the news channel watched by 60 million people that is willing to say the same thing about Christians.

Compared to the number of hateful things about Muslims/democrats/gays/blacks? Yes.

I’d be actually shocked to find out the reverse. A good percentage of the US were born up in an era where you could legally bar people based on their race from your establishment. The extremely heated fight over gay marriage is still fresh in people’s memory. Trans rights are a controversial political issue where many mainstream politicians want to legislate them out of public spaces, because of public sentiment. And for the left/right leaning question, In the last two major elections we’ve seen the political discourse even of republicans politicians and leaders is comparatively charged with violence.

The hate is definitely there against the republicans and mainstream groups, but I would expect it to be relatively uncommon compared to the hateful text you can find online about other groups. This could be a real problem for novel kinds of hate speech.

Have you considered that your political bubble might minimize reporting of hate and violence originating from your in-group, while amplifying reporting of hate and violence originating from your out-group?

Yes, it’s definitely a filter I live in. And we unfortunately do not have their public training data corpus.

However, it’s also true that I can trivially find clips of mainstream republican leaders over the last few years with violent charged rhetoric, and it is comparatively harder to find such rhetoric from mainstream democrats[0][1]

For many of the other groups, hate has been historically so widespread and common there are whole organizations like the annti defamation league organized around combating it. There is no way that even if you believe today people are furiously writing hate against Christians into twitter 24/7 or wherever my bubble they could have caught up with the historic use of hate speech against Muslims in the wake of 9/11. And so on for the other disadvantaged groups.

And all this is not to say it isn’t a potential problem or a potentially useful metric. It could be that synthetic hate is needed to anticipate new kinds of unlikely and rare sentence structures that might arise. If this is true it also reminds us that these models will need constant training as new kinds of hate speech become more popular and that it will always be lagging.

[0]https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-fred-upton-paul-gosa...

[1[https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/how-some-members-of-th...

There’s gotta be orders of magnitudes more than hate speech against disabled people, yet it seems to get those right.

Not sure what you mean? It’s more sensitive against disabled people than the other, more rare strings the author chose like “non disabled people”, which would be consistent with my theory that there is more hate against disabled people in the training set and so the model is more sensitive against that being in the sequence of tokens

I really can't think of a large site in which discrimination for muslims/democrats/gays/blacks isn't more frowned upon than whites/republicans/christians etc. Even places like 4chan are mixed bags. Even MSM if you want to count that.

It has to be frowned upon because it is so prevalent among fringe hate groups. If you don’t have strong moderation and social norms around it, hate against those groups is what drowns out the other text. 4chan is a great example, if you remove moderation hate against those groups seemingly spontaneously arises.

Absolutely. Compared to the inverse it's microscopic. Have you heard of a very cool and normal AI called Tay?

Belief that hateful rhetoric is one-sided on the internet — and does not target the aforementioned groups — is a fascinating case of bias that deserves some research of its own.

It’s really not that it’s one sided, it’s that it’s clearly more common to see hate speech anywhere unmoderated against some disadvantaged groups. And this is likely a consequence of history. It’s more curious to me when people think that it should be balanced, that we would expect people to be writing hate speech about the majority as often as fringe members of the majority write hate speech about minorities.

And that’s what this metric is measuring, the model finding hate more easily with “fat people are terrible” than “normal weight people are terrible”

Believing hate is distributed evenly amongst majority and minority groups, to me, is an even more fascinating bias.

Believing that human social pathologies are likely universal is a bias?

Hateful expression is more prominent when it’s socially acceptable, and in American society at large, there are socially acceptable targets for hate that do not align with the majority/minority group division.

Consider, for example, the prominent, public, long-standing (and for some reason, tolerated) racial animosity between Asian and Black Americans.

Wait, so you think minority groups hating one another is not aligned with the majority/minority group division? I don't understand; by definition each group is a member of a minority social group, wouldn't that obviously be the case that they're therefore subject to all of the negativity that entails? There's no unity amongst minority groups, if that's what you're suggesting; the majority group makes it tolerable to espouse hate against all minority groups, including from other minority groups.

You say you don't know why it's tolerated, but that's my point exactly; it's tolerated because it's hate towards a minority group (regardless of the source). It would be substantially less tolerated if it were hate towards the majority group.

Hate is far more tolerated from minority groups regardless of the target.

Consider how often you’ve read “kill all men” or “kill all terfs”, versus “kill all women” or “kill all transgender people”.

Furthermore, consider the stronger emotional reaction you likely had to reading the second two, as opposed to the first two.

For sure, hate from a group in control is much different than hate from a group that isn't in control.

"Terfs" aren't the ones in control, not by a long shot. Radical feminists have been consistently mocked and marginalised since their activism started.

By contrast, trans-identifying people are comparatively celebrated in our society.

Okay? What I said still stands.

I could browse this very website for a few minutes and probably find examples of those things.

Examples is not the same as proportionally larger. I can find instances of things sliding up hill, but it's not the phenomenon I would expect if I were guessing blind.

Yeah but the guy is saying "whaaat pfft that's not happening" while hanging out on a site where it happens all the friggin time. It's just bullshit. He sounds like someone who hangs out in and around plenty of places where such things are commonplace.

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