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Politically-engaged Redditors tend to be more toxic -- even in non-political subreddits
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this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Political topics are also the topics that are most strongly gamed by political actors using Persona Management software to make it seem like their opinion is in the majority. The idea that people who participate in things such as "forum sliding" aren't toxic in their interactions is absurd, so we're left with assuming a large number of these toxic accounts aren't actually real people.
I'm not saying people deep into politics can't be toxic. Plenty of them are, sure. However, it's in the interest of people with political power (especially politicians with politically unpopular ideas) to make regular people not want to participate in politics. One way you do that is to make all political people seem unhinged, angry, and just terrible. People wonder why hardly anyone votes in elections, this kind of stuff is why, and it's not on accident that these folks seem like the majority.
I'm fully convinced the majority of them are bots trying to make politics in general seem more toxic than it actually is to dissuade more people from even wanting to be involved. The intent is to drive political apathy.
Sources:
US government developing Persona Management software in 2011: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks
Eglin Air Force Base is most "Reddit Addicted City" in 2014: https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.html
One of many research papers on Persona Management and Influencing Social Networks from Eglin AFB: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf
Helpful Reading Materials:
The Gentleperson's Guide To Forum Spies: https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm
100% agree with you. The worst part is the bots are getting better and better. I have a policy that you respond once to clarify and then walk away. These are for obvious bad actors, but now they're seeming more and more like decent people with a flawed idea until you keep talking and realize it's a bot. I don't know how to counteract that.
Simple. You don't. When I'm debating, I'm usually not trying to convince the person I'm debating with. I'm trying to convince a disinterested third party who reads the exchange later.
I completely agree that it's for the later people, it's just a waste of time for me when it's become a lengthy thread that nobody is going to read anyway.
The other thing they do is a bot attack of taking what people are saying, changing it, and then posting a lot of them to bury comments that they don't want others to see. Not sure how to counteract that either.
How do you know they're actually bots? 90% of the time, when I'm debating with someone who is passionately defending their position, they'll at some point accuse me of being a bot or a shill. I also can't recall any time I've debated someone and have been convinced they are a bot.
I'm just skeptical as it's a convenient ad hominem.
To be totally honest with you, I wouldn't for one second be surprised if the bots are programmed to accuse humans of being bots.
I have the same question. How do you distinguish an advanced enough bot from a genuinely dumb person?
Or "smart" person. There are almost certainly bots who espouse beliefs that align with yours too.
Up until a few weeks ago, it seemed these bots were mostly absent on Lemmy.
But recently, I have noticed they have arrived here, too.
I fully agree with your analysis.
In what way? Lemmy has been very political from the start. It arguably got less-so after the influx of redditors.
What are you seeing in the last month or so that makes you think there's something more abnormal happening than usual?
If “trying to find common ground and building from there” is normal human behavior, then normal behavior is in the minority these days. I haven’t had an in-person conversation with someone that disagrees with me that is even remotely attempting to find common ground in a very long time. It’s definitely not typical in my experience.
The funny thing is that I read this comment, and then looked at your post history completely expecting to find an obvious troll*, but no. You are consistently and commendably courteous in your disagreements, even as you collect an Olympian number of downvotes on what seem to be very innocuous statements.
*Every time someone says something along the lines of others not wanting to find commonality with them, I look at their post history. I am only rarely disappointed, lol
I do appreciate you saying that.
I try to be kind unless someone’s being an absolute turd, but I’m also trying to be less afraid to leave downvoted comments that I genuinely believe in. I kinda had a problem with deleting any heavily downvoted comments in my Reddit history, so Lemmy’s obfuscation of karma has been quite helpful in that regard, and it’s nice to see that some of those comments helped subvert your assumptions.
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It is definitely difficult to gauge a stranger’s tone. Not sure what it is exactly about the way I write, but people often suspect I’m trolling when I’m being genuine.
As for the karma, I suspect that the total on the desktop site will be going away soon. It used to exist in the apps I use, but one day comment and post karma disappeared from Voyager, and recently Avelon dropped their summed total karma altogether. At first I resisted losing the counts, but after asking around, I learned that showing the totals is being actively discouraged to devs of the various apps because it’s thought to lead to unhealthy user behaviors. The more I thought about it, the more I agreed I’m guilty of a lot of those behaviors as a result of my 15 years on Reddit, so I’ve since tried to embrace its absence.
It's because it's not only untrue, but almost the exact opposite of the truth. Humans tend to defend themselves when they find their beliefs threatened, not open themselves up.
This is the heart of a lot of lots of couples therapy: learning how to express your discontent without making it about your partner. If interested, read up on "I" statements. And we're talking about people in committed relationships shutting themselves down to each other. Imagine how easy it is to do when you label the person as "the other team."
That's been here for a while. When I became a mod of c/politics some users stalked my profile to use it as proof my me being a terrible choice. They're evidence was me not having a degree in political science, disagreeing with them on some issues, and having a complicated relationship with my mom. I said simply check the modlogs, and there haven't been any complaints since.
This is wildly untrue. Even outside the confines of the Internet. People tend to circle the wagons when their beliefs are threatened, rather than try and find common ground. Which is why the way we debate ( and I'm debating now) is so ineffectual. You need to guide the person to come to the conclusion themselves (which is why the Socratic method is so widely respected), not tell them they are wrong and you are right and here's why. It's a low success method.
On the Internet, it's even less true. Now I'm just a dehumanized bunch of words, not even an individual, so your mind is rushing to try and figure out to categorize me so you can make assumptions about me. This just compounds the above issues.
Your argument seems to rest on the claim that this is atypical human behavior. This is a false assumption, and thus conclusions based on it are faulty.
Intriguing. I don’t totally know what I think about this argument. A purposeful initiative to make politics toxic to get people to stop paying attention. It’s not one I had totally considered before. You think that’s really going on?
I have had many experiences with real people not on the internet that seem to fixate largely on politics and believe so fervently that they are right that they allow themselves to become toxic. I always thought it was a kind of inconsistent latent belief in utilitarianism combined with overconfidence.
I'm not saying those people don't really exist, there are tons of them out there for sure, but we also have extensive evidence of governments doing this.
GCHQ in the UK had JTRIG using many forum disruption techniques.
There's also the Five Eyes and how they use information sharing to essentially do an end-run around being able to spy on their own citizens. Technically, they're not spying on their own citizens, a foreign nation is, they just so happen to have an agreement with that foreign nation to get info on their own citizens.
The US definitely engages in this kind of stuff on foreign nations as well. They tried to create a social media service for Cuba to influence Cuban politics and do information gathering.
Do either the UK or the US have to spy on their own citizens if they can rely on each other to run influence campaigns in each others countries? The US had to apologize to Angela Merkel for tapping her phone.
Israel has many different programs aimed at managing the PR of the state of Israel online. From paying college students to speak positively of Israel online to having "Think Tanks" use teams of people to influence Wikipedia.
We know that Hacking Team was selling their surveillance software to oppressive regimes, who were definitely using it to oppress the population. If they're using these kind of tools, they're using online disinformation tools as well.
So once again, there's tons of real life absolute maniacs when it comes to politics. There's also incentive for governments around the world to run influence campaigns for pennies on the dollar with digital tools in the digital world.
I think you’re right that there are people out there trying to manipulate and influence social media - I mean even that platforms themselves do this to a certain extent.
The idea that they purposely try to make it toxic to push the more intellectually-honest, emotionally-controlled people out of the conversation is the interesting part to me.
This particular facet feels less like intentional manipulation and more like a side-effect of our platforms and how they function.
Found a reddit mod with a dozen plus accounts. Made a new account to disagree with me, I pointed it out, and he denied it, but never used that account again.
It was probably just someone with no life, but I'd feel better about the world if he were being paid for it.
Are there any sources on this from the last decade?
Because I'm not sure if you noticed, but 2016 was kind of a big moment for politics and it triggered a lot of anger and controversy. Politics on social media are a very different thing now than they were in 2011/2012. Which is to say nothing of the well-documented uptick in foreign troll farms and manipulative content sorting, which may have been present in the early 2010s, but no where near the degree it was in the latter half, and still is today.
It's also worth pointing out this uptick in "political toxicity" is mirrored in real life. You can't blame the protests and increasingly violent altercations in real life on some psyops trying to make people not engage in politics.
And frankly...if the goal is to get people turned off from voting, they're failing. Turn out has been going up.
Why, what happened in 2016? Did 46% of registered voters lose their goddamned minds and vote to put an entirely incompetent and demented convicted fraud and rapist sociopath who wears clown makeup in charge of the federal government or something? Why would that increase the fervor of fucking social fucking media for fuck’s sake jesus goddamned christ on a busted motherfucking crutch!!!
Sorry. You were saying?