'Troll hunting' algorithm could make web a better place
wired.co.uk
wired.co.uk
Is our nation under that much of a threat? I know America's power is waning, but if it is waning this badly we should all get very worried.
If some mega corporation is stealing your properties and rights, it should phrase that as somethign like: An act not really understood by this person is being performed by a big company, and you are feeling a little sad about it.
Counterexamples: What happens when you apply that algorithm to R. Stallman, Linux Torvald, or people with strong opinions? Sometimes those supposed trolls are the person with the real information and correct views and not the blind sheep. By the way the former president of the FMI is now in a very difficult position in Spain, surely algorithms doesn't work so well to detect what they should detect.
Disclaimer: Not a native speaker. Edit: grammar. Added counterexamples.
HN broadcasts the fact that it hellbans users. There's even a toggle in your profile to see the posts of the damned. HN also seems to gratuitously hellban people - if someone isn't hellbanned for being an obvious troll, sometimes they seem to be hellbanned over lightweight snark or nothing at all. HN even has its own notoriously hellbanned "HN celebrity": the creator of Temple OS. It's no secret.
Yet every day I notice hellbanned posts where the user has been hellbanned for some time now and they do not notice.
On my forum, I only hellban users so uncontroversially egregious (bots, spammers, and people who only post to pilfer value from the community) that nobody notices or would care if they did.
To "expose" the system, a user would pretty much have to create a topic like this: "Hey everyone, you don't know me because I've been trying to PM new users with links to my competing forum for half a year, but I just found out that nobody has been receiving my PMs because I've been hellbanned. Help me protest this system!"
This is why I have a problem with things like this. "negative words" might be why I disagree with the politics of the article...and poor spelling and grammar? Are we now discriminating against a certain type of person now? Do people that can't spell very well deserve to have their opinions ignored?
This seems like nothing more than a smoke-screen to silence opposing view points and opinions. The up/down vote buttons already serve this purpose quite well.
The same is already happening on Twitter. Activist groups against discrimination pass out lists of people to perma-ban based on nothing more but opposing opinions...doing the same exact thing they are supposed to be against.
Yes. Indeed they do. Good spelling is a mark of conscientiousness and attention to detail. Bad spelling is indicative of loose morals and an addiction to video games and misogyny that should be extirpated from polite society.
Note also that users of a public channel ( Twitter ) choosing to accept other peoples suggestions as to who they should ignore so that they are not subjected to the vilest forms of verbal/textual abuse that humanity has invented; is not censorship.
Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/1357/
Is that a joke? How can you possibly justify that conclusion?
Having spent some time on the internet I've spoken and chatted with people for whom English is a second language. Are you telling me that their deficient understanding of English indicates a lack of morality? Is the English language a religion now? Guess I didn't get the memo.
The author is the daughter of Czech emigrants, writing about her experience visiting the Czech Republic, with an focus on the difference between learning a new language as an adult and re-learning a language you once knew. From the link:
> There can be a striking lack of accommodation or cooperation on the part of listeners [in rural Czech areas]. Once, when traveling with my brother, I watched him flounder in Czech at a small town gas station, trying to convey which pack of cigarettes he wanted to purchase—he had forgotten the brand name, and was trying to describe the appearance of the package. Ignoring his pointing gestures, the cashier sat stone-faced through his attempts. When she finally identified what he wanted, she tossed the cigarettes on the counter, saying contemptuously, “As you can see, the package is red, not pink.” My brother apologized, “I’m sorry, my Czech is very bad.” “I can see that,” she replied without cracking the slightest smile.
Experience with second-language learners is, speaking broadly, vanishingly rare among humans. Most people never meet any language learners. The rural Czechs are going by a rule of thumb: someone speaking that badly is more likely to be severely mentally retarded than anything else. (And they're correct about that! If they started seeing a flood of foreign tourists with rudimentary Czech, they'd adjust accordingly.)
Are you insinuating they should accept suggestions from other nations and tribes? Or did you just omit the "'" , thus exposing yourself as a misspellist, a loosemoralist , a videogamist and misogynist? I hope the Trolly Inquisition finds you and burns your router!
I am less than sympathetic to the viewpoint that someone can demand the right to be listened to as well as the right to speak. Allow me to be explicitly and excruciatingly clear on that point. You are free to say whatever you want, to print it, to publish it on the internet, to build signs on your property, etc. without fearing arrest or detention. But; you do not have the right to demand that others spend even a fraction of a second of their time on this earth paying attention to you.
And by loose morals I mean that disgusting sense of entitlement to others time and bodily affection that seems to characterize the "Gamergate community".
Hundreds of millions of people all over the world speak English as their second, third or fourth language. That fact alone makes them more interesting than some grammar sharia asshole.
Edit: grammar :)
Here's how science works: If you don't like the conclusions, you can question the methodology. You can conduct the experiment yourself to see if you can reproduce the results. You can run your own studies and see if you come up with different conclusions. But you don't get to say "Hmm, the data don't conform to my preconceived notions about how the world should work, so I reject their implications."
Everyone doesn't agree with the idea that every thought from every person should be heard at all times. Some people are just jerks. "Trolling", by definition, is about making provocative statements to incite reactions, as opposed to contributing to conversations. There are places where that kind of thing is accepted (4chan) and places where it is not (hn). Tools that help communities to encourage their preferred forms of communication are good things, and will be increasingly important in the future.
These measures they came up with are heuristic proxy measures at the very best, and noise at the worst.
The troll hunting algorithm has to face the false positive problem [1], which the paper does not address.
My very legitimate content has been censored various places (notably Facebook) because it tripped 'anti-trolling and scam algorithms' but the things I was trying to post were Snowden and Manning, and TPP leaks.
I believe the core of paulhauggis' point was closer to the idea that trolling and behaviour that leads to being banned are not the same thing. Scope in studies is as important as anything else.
Disproportionally faster engagement over a given short time period and low variance of word choices along with repeated use of n-grams >= 4 words are all much more indicative then profanity.
Trolls are argumentative and tend to resort to trite sloganish language. They are no more rude then the average commentator (which is fairly impersonal and insincere)
It's about a general discordance with a generic community and what that looks like. There's two kinds: the salvageable and the hopeless. The hopeless is unwavering and defensive - irritable and divisive.
You can see where and when users post - them there are extreme outliers - those are usually bot spammers; the next group in, the first humans, they are the trolls
These are not hard things to compute - and profanity has nothing to do with it.
Alas,yet another thing I should have written up in LATEX and sent off to a fancy journal...
Because once you implement the classifier you affect the world. And you have to take into account what those effects are. Two properties I think are desirable: 1. It should encourage good behaviour. By this I mean that if you adapt to the get a better evaluation that means you also become a better member of the forum. This relates to not being gameable. 2. It should give everyone a chance. For example I could see how being poor could correlate with low quality posts. But shutting out all poor people means you can lose valuable perspectives, so its not an ideal solution. As long as your posts are good you should be welcome, even if your a pleb.
I light of these, consider what filtering for poor spelling actually does. What do we know that correlates with poor spelling? a) being a foreigner. b) being poor / uneducated. c) being underage. Those are the people you filter out. This goes against the 2'nd principle I mentioned of giving everyone a chance. It's a tradeoff, of course, and I could see how it's worth it sometimes.
The assumption that "trolls" are trying to "incite reactions, as opposed to contributing to conversations" is often repeated, but in practice, "troll" is a term that is often used against people whose viewpoint is minority, but who are legitimately arguing it.
Those with the majority viewpoint often find it convenient to dismiss (and attempt to discredit) those they disagree with by simply calling them troll. And it's not uncommon for forums to be operated in such a way as to actually ban people with minority viewpoints.
Of course, but the "troll" wants to have that conversation, and the rest of the community does not. That doesn't mean the conversation or opinions are unworthy or wrong, just that they are unwelcome in this context.
Good or bad doesn't matter, the "troll" is a disruptive influence that turns a comfortable place into an uncomfortable one.
Most people don't come to the Internet to have their beliefs challenged, no matter how wrong those beliefs might be.
I am someone who is not often harassed online, but I am involved with people who frequently experience harassment. I've been using Twitter block lists[2] and have noticed a great absence of hateful responses. This is not a long-term solution, but it lowers the number of times a day that my heart sinks. I accept any incidental losses.
The article suggests a finer brush using something like crowdsourcing. Perhaps harassment targets could pay to submit their profiles for monitoring, and the resultant block list could be made public for subscription by anyone on Block Together[2].
It would be nice to see networks take a stand against repeat harassers, but clearly people are tired of waiting around for that.
[1] https://github.com/freebsdgirl/ggautoblocker
[2] https://blocktogether.org/
EDIT: Without responses, I'm coming to some disappointing conclusions.
Should such harassment be an actual problem, there would already be such filtered alternatives to twitter and facebook. Right now i see it as an attempt to silence unfavorable opinions.
In the hypothetical situation that harassment is prevalent, I'm curious as to what your alternatives to Twitter/Facebook would look like. What would the requirements of joining such a community be?
An alternative to twitter would be filtered, just as you suggest. It could even exclude "offending" opinions. There are plenty of easily offended (but very vocal) people who think all public channels should be like that. However we don't see any startup that is advocating censored speak catching up (I don't even know if there are any, but the social startup space is so overcrowded that there must be some).
So maybe you should reflect on the conditions that have duped you into taking such a simplistic position.
If you want to distance yourself from the documented invasion into the lives and the distinct harassment of women in the industry, my humble suggestion is to pick a new angle from which to fight. How about Doritogate?
I fear we have gotten quite off-topic.
We saw this from the likes of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot ... to Anti-Gamer-Gate. In this context claims of harassment are a smokescreen that are being used to cover up the exposed corruption. They appeal to the damsel-in-distress narrative that so many men so easily fall for. It's quite an effective strategy, and some guys like John Flynt (aka Brianna Wu) make quite a good living of it seemingly. Maybe you should also try it when your software isn't good: wear girls clothes, send yourself some threatening emails and whine about harassment on TV ... worth quite a stack of paper I hear.
BTW Wikipedia is not a credible source.
That said, the anti-corruption movement is also real. And it is a fact the gg-blocklist does block well behaved non-harassers based on political views.
You both want good things. Why can't you just both agree on ending harassment and be anti-corruption? Those are really not incompatible positions, if you are will willing to look past the us-vs-them tribe mentality.
This is just part of an ongoing slide into the sort of factionalism that ends (eventually) in bloodshed.
My suggestion is that social networks ban users wherein harassment is strictly obvious, not wherein a prejudice opinion is even only implied. This is a tricky judgement call that the article tries to dissect, and unfortunately to which I clearly have little to contribute.
People should also consider that if they can't handle the vile cesspit that the internet is, using it is optional.
For another... if people you don't know are being malicious to you maybe you should step back and think about your public face. People who draw a lot of trolls do so for a reason.
The only possible reason to claim that others need to pay attention to those who would spam them with threats of death rape and worse is complicity with the intended assault. It is a leech declaring that refusal to wade in the swamp is murder.
I am guessing this isn't "strange attractor" either. Oldskool BSD people know who I mean.
Out of even more curiosity, why does this straightforward question deserve a downvote?
There are slides from a talk she did on it here: https://www.bsdcan.org/2009/schedule/events/126.en.html
I think it's fair to say that whatever disagreements people might have with her, her technical credentials do check out.