Auditing Elon Musk's Impact on Hate Speech and Bots

by rbanffy • 3 years ago

25 40 3 years ago

josephh• 3 years ago

FYI, in conjunction with Perspective API[1], this is the list of words that authors used to determine whether a tweet is considered hateful: https://github.com/dan-hickey1/musk-hate-lexicon/blob/main/h...

1. https://perspectiveapi.com/

VHRanger• 3 years ago

This is kind of a short list and very narrow in scope I find?

I would have expected more sophistication

uvnq• 3 years ago

Among the list of hate words in the lexicon (after filtering out words with a cumulative score less than 4) is 'antiwhite'. Why?

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...

krapp• 3 years ago

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...

aydyn4• 3 years ago

Are you implying a Pepe dressed as a clown is "hate speech"...?

Incredible.

This is why half the country doesn't take accusations of "hate" seriously.

LightHugger• 3 years ago

these aren't legitimate sources, you might as well link stormfront for proof that antifa drink the blood of infants. those articles are full of insane tenuous leaps of logic so far beyond anything rational.

EarlKing2• 3 years ago

Why would that be odd? Most people encounter memes in the wild far removed from their point of origin. They have only the context in which it is used to interpret its meaning. Even if it had anti-semitic origins that doesn't mean it is used as such in the vast majority of instances any more than every use of Pepe or Groyper is.

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*

version_five• 3 years ago

Seems like maybe it's not actually the "dog whistle" conspiracy the links claim and it's possible people just see it as " the author thinks something societal or political is ridiculous" as the GP mentioned?

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).

justinclift• 3 years ago

It's used widely around the internet these days without any of that bullshit.

So it's not surprising people wouldn't associate it with racism, or know it may have at one time been linked.

prepend• 3 years ago

Finding more hate speech makes a more attention getting paper therefore the trend is likely to have higher sensitivity.

viraptor4• 3 years ago

Among the list of hate words in the lexicon ... is 'antiwhite'. Why?

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.

badrabbit• 3 years ago

"Applejuice" can be a hate word if those groups use it as a dogwhistle.

xodjmk• 3 years ago

if you have a hard time understanding basic words, anti + white, you have been critically brainwashed.

HopenHeyHi8• 3 years ago

  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

Yeah. Running a random list of words you don't like through a blackbox is some garbage-in garbage-out voodoo. It hardly matters what random words bots were able to generate on Twitter, what might matter is how many humans actually saw and interacted with any of it.

  The spike in March, 2022 coincides with the Canada convoy protests.

Proceeds to show literally the opposite. There is no measurable permanent spike of anything at all in their own graph!

These sort of "studies" will hurt the credibility of researches longer term.

maxbond6• 3 years ago

I think you misread the chart?

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.

HopenHeyHi8• 3 years ago

I think the chart is either extremely poorly made or intentionally misleading?

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.

Auditing Elon Musk's Impact on Hate Speech and Bots

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