politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
view the rest of the comments
You can just tell people now what you already know. Like its all out here in the open. You can't really lie in the fediverse.
I think you misunderstood my comment.
Anyways, I’ll wait.
Have fun!
[I had to switch to a larger compute instance]
@[email protected]
Ok, results are in. Firstly, just some preliminary stuff on your posting behavior. I only pulled your last 6k comments, which goes back to February. You caught me at a good time, because I had been working on parts of this for a while for some network analyses I'm working on looking at the relationship between moderation bias and community sentiment, so I had some of these tools just laying around.
It looks like you really got posting in around April, and hit your stride over summer. You've slowed down a bit since. Also, you tend post most frequently at about 19:00 GMT or 3PM EST/ 12 PST, and then again around midnight GMT, or about 8PM EST/ 5PM PST.
For this work, I'll be using some models from this paper: https://huggingface.co/papers/2409.02078, "Political DEBATE: Efficient Zero-shot and Few-shot Classifiers for Political Text". This tool allows me to set up hypotheses like the following.
multilabel entailment labels
The multilabel option determines if more than one hypothesis can be true for the document. If false, the most likely label is returned. If true, a dictionary of labels and their estimated probability is returned.
Below is the result of the hypothesis 'The author of this reply {} Biden.', with the two options: {h0: 'is talking about', h1: 'is not talking about'], where we accept h0 at >0.5
It appears that your posts mention Biden at a relatively uniform rate. Please note that we're in percent of posts, not count (as with the previous two figures), since your post frequency has changed over time. It seems like for any given week, 5-15% of your posts typically mention Biden.
So for the below analysis, I tested the hypothesis "The author of this reply {} Biden.", with h0 being "is supportive of" and h1 being "is in opposition to". I only performed this analysis that had a very high probability of being about Biden.
So, "generally" supportive, but not crazy. You started less supportive of Biden than you are now, but like I said, I only grabbed the previous 6k comments of yours. Generally you seem to be about 50/50 on Biden. Which is against my previous assumption, I thought you were more supportive of Biden (closer to 80-90%).
The next experiment I ran was the test (on all of your comments, not just the ones mentioning Biden) was the hypothesis "The author of this reply {} Biden.", with h0 being "is being abusive, or trolling." and h1 being "is being honest and genuine.". I ran this test on all comments.
Honestly, @SatansMaggotyCumFart@[email protected] , I think you can up your game. You've got ample headroom to live up to your legacy.
HOWEVER.. If we look at the same results for posts which are explicitly about Biden... we can see that you are trolling and abusive at a rate much higher than your background rate.
So there is your answer. Not as bad as I thought, but not great. Definitely an abusive troll when it comes to political discussions.
Some limitations about this approach. I want to expand it to include the context that a given comments sits in. Its fine for a cursory analysis like this to just use single comments, but context is key. I think we'll get much clearer signal/ noise with more context. Also, these conversations happen in a threaded manner. I need to develop a way of accounting for that. I'll probably pull some methods that I've used for network analysis for that component. But I got the major issues out of the way, and I can run these kinds of analysis for anyone on the fediverse. So for a preliminary step, its at least on its way to being sufficient to identify bad faith/ troll accounts.
By what basis do you consider a comment abusive or trolling?
Don’t forget this is what you’re trying to prove, and you make a bunch of charts that don’t really prove anything instead.
Its part of how the hypothesis is set up. You can read the paper I cited here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.02078
So specifically for that question the hypothesis “The author of this reply {} Biden.”, with h0 being “is being abusive, or trolling.” and h1 being “is being honest and genuine.”
And on your second point, since I've still got the data up, we can address that specifically. We'll address the following hypotheses. 'The author of this reply {}': 'is accusing someone of being a russian asset.', 'is accusing some one of trolling.', 'is accusing someone of being a bot.', 'is accusing someone of engaging in bad faith', 'is having a normal conversation'.
Only if you lack reading comprehension.
No, you’re pretty much stating you created a tool to detect trolling better than any tech company has and you’re using it on me.
Or you’re just drawing random graphs.
You’re trying to say 50% of my comments are accusing people of arguing in bad faith?
I think I’d test the model if I were you.
Sorry I should have been more clear. That was for the "high confidence that the conversation is around Biden" cohort of comments. So within a subset of about 5% of your overall number of comments., so maybe 2.5 - 5% of comments in total you are making one of these kinds of accusations, or about 1:20 or 1:40. I ran a frequency analysis, and at several points you just spam the same comment over and over again, so that might be skewing things. I'm not sure that should be filtered out, because it is trolling.
And yes, I think more testing is required, but most importantly, I think I need to get more of a context window around comments. I want to do this using the whole comment chain or thread. That gets more complicated because now you have 'identities' (speaker A, speaker B, C.. etc), which is where the graphical approach is going to show its benefits. Again, work for another time. At least at a first pass, a few minutes of work adjacent to some other work I'm doing level of effort, its more than sufficient to make my point.
Ok.
I’d be selling it to Google, Facebook or Reddit for many millions but keep using your amazing moderation tool on me buddy.
I’m curious what would happen if you use it on UniversalMonk?
But I almost guarantee there’s a reason why you can’t or won’t.
I'm putting dinner together but I'd be happy to run UM if you would like me to. In exchange would you read the paper so you can understand how the sentiment analysis works? Its important for hypothesis testing. You need to set up good hypotheses for this to be effective.I'm going to down load their comment database now. You work on coming up with some hypotheses.
Oh, that’s the reason you won’t, right?
Because I’m not a computer scientist so I can’t understand the sentiment analysis and come up with appropriate hypotheses?
You were able to for me so why aren’t you able to again?
The fuck are you talking about. I literally said I was doing it in my response.
Bruh this is why you come up as a troll in so much of your comments.
Maybe work on your reading comprehension.
I’m glad you proved my point that you are unwilling or unable to perform the same analysis that you claimed you did on me.
I'm literally setting up for that right now, and for the third time you are accusing of not doing exactly what I'm trying to do for you. It takes a while to download all the comments. I'll let you know when I have them.
That’s the part you might be having troubles with.
I’ve tried telling you that a couple times now.
Did you open the paper and read it? The hypothesis are very simple.
They need to be set up with two parts, the first a predicate, then the second part is a couple options..
So for example a hypothesis can be set up in two parts as follows:
Part A:
"The author of this comment { } about a border wall"
Part B:
["thinks negatively" | "thinks positively" "is neutral"]
The options are intended to fill in the gap in the curly braces.
The model will give a probabilistic ranking of the three options, so you need to think carefully about how you set up your hypothesis.
Like I said drop them here or dm me and I can run them once I've scrapped UMs comments.
[Edit: I've got UM's comments, and I've saved them to disk. Let me know if you've got your questions ready, or if you still need help understanding how to set up a hypothesis]
[Addendum] @[email protected]
I'm going to give you a worked example.
This is on UM's most recent comment:
So I set up the predicate:
'The author of this post {} Joe Biden.'
with the options:
['supports', 'opposes', 'is not talking about']
and we get the result:
{'sequence': 'She was on my ballot, so she is a candidate. I don’t know how to explain this any better.',
'labels': ['is not talking about', 'supports', 'opposes'],
'scores': [0.9906510710716248, 0.008063388988375664, 0.0012855551904067397]}
So this comment we would score as "not talking about Joe Biden". Anything you can think of that can fit within that framework. I dont know UM, but you seem to, so you probably know what would be interesting to ask.
You were able to do it for me, so there’s no reason you can’t for someone else.
Wtf?
Wow he really got you there, listing number of comments and stuff!!1!
Gunna be honest here, this just makes you look insane, terminally online, or both. It doesn't help your position, and just because you can make graphs doesn't somehow make you any more correct in this context.
Maybe step back and see what you just wasted your time doing. You changed no minds, put in a ton of effort, and for what?
What because you don't understand how basic sentiment analysis works.
Also, and interestingly, your accounts posting frequency is super interesting, especially in regards to when and how you engage in political posts.
?
Oh no! You looked at my post history. I'm so scared!
Nah, just kidding. It still just makes you seem insane, especially given the context.
Oh no! Not calling me a sock puppet deep in a nested comment, and with images! The horror!
Nope, still just insane. You gunna post another image of a sock puppet and look even more insane?
Why don't I get the pretty, meaningless graphs?