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Politically-engaged Redditors tend to be more toxic -- even in non-political subreddits (www.psypost.org)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Politically-engaged Redditors tend to be more toxic -- even in non-political subreddits::A new study links partisan activity on the Internet to widespread online toxicity, revealing that politically-engaged users exhibit uncivil behavior even in non-political discussions. The findings are based on an analysis of hundreds of millions of comments from over 6.3 million Reddit users.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I mean, from a quick test of Perspective using their web page, it is not flagging some pretty strong political statements (mentions of late stage capitalism, calling republicans fascists, accusing Democrats of turning the country into a communist nanny state, etc) and none of them are getting flagged. Whereas, if I tell that text prompt to "go fuck your mother", it understands that is toxic.

Because... this is kind of a solved problem. There are inherent biases but the goal of this is not to figure out which black man we can frame for a crime. It is to handle moderation. And overly strict moderation means less money. So while there likely is a bias, it does not seem to be an overly strong one and probably actually reflects the perceived reality.

Honestly? It sounds like you don't like the outcome so you are effectively saying "fake news".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Honestly? It sounds like you don't like the outcome so you are effectively saying "fake news".

You must understand the irony in me warning about being careful about drawing conclusions, and you arriving at this conclusion.

What about the outcome would I even find objectionable? The outcome didn't find a difference between right and left? I DO personally believe that political discourse has gotten extremely toxic. I DO personally believe that people who are politically active ARE in generally more toxic in general conversation. Every single thing in this article confirms what I already believe to be true

I STILL DO NOT LIKE THE STUDY, because I do not believe that the design results in data that necessarily supports the conclusion. I'm not going to give this study a hall pass on rigor because I agree with its conclusion.

Edit:

Also, on the topic of politics and Perspective AI:

Baseline Sentence: "No X could ever be as good a X as Y" Base values: X=CEO Y=Henry Ford

Test Sentence 1: X = CEO Y=Donald Trump +41% more likely to be toxic than baseline

Test Sentence 2: X = CEO Y=Joe Biden +37% more likely to be toxic than baseline

Test Sentence 3: Y = President Y=Henry Ford +61% more likely to be toxic than baseline

Test Sentence 4: X = President Y = Joe Biden +94% more likely to be toxic than baseline

Test Sentence 5: X = President Y = Donald Trump +102% more likely to be toxic than baseline

I gotta be honest with you: my results do not disprove my hypothesis that the system is intrinsically biased to skew any political sentences along the "Toxic" axis