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A first-of-its-kind mapping model tracks how hate spread and adapts online—providing what researchers hope is a blueprint for stopping it.
Analysts from the University of Miami and George Washington University developed a chart showing how “global hate highways” can bridge social networks, geographic borders, languages, and ideologies.
“Hate destroys lives,” GW physics professor Neil Johnson said in a statement. “Not only as we’ve seen in El Paso, Orlando, and New Zealand, but psychologically through online bullying and rhetoric.”
The team focused on global platform Facebook, as well as its European counterpart VKontakte—the most popular site in Russia.
Over a period of a few months, they mapped how clusters (groups or pages that build a community based on shared views, interests, or purposes) interconnect to spread narratives and attract recruits.
The results, published this week in the journal Nature, suggest a sort of Catch-22 for social media companies and their users.
While administrators are expected to aggressively eradicate hate content, banning trolls from one platform often compels them to move to another—simply shifting the resentment instead of eliminating it.
“It is essentially a whack-the-mole game,” senior study author Stefan Wuchty, an associate professor at UM, explained. “Once you whack one mole it will show up somewhere else.
“It is counter-intuitive, but pushing hate groups from social media platforms actually has the opposite effect,” he continued. “It creates a more concentrated assembly of those groups on a different platform.”
A researcher team mapped how clusters of hate interconnect to spread narratives and attract new recruits (via University of Miami/George Washington University)
At the core of the problem, Wuchty pointed out, is social media platforms’ reluctance to work together and unite their policies for change. Until then, hate groups will only continue to grow across the world wide web.
“The analogy is no matter how much weed killer you place in a yard, the problem will come back, potentially more aggressively,” according to Johnson.
“In the online world, all yards in the neighborhood are interconnected in a highly complex way—almost like wormholes,” he said. “This is why individual social media platforms like Facebook need new analysis such as ours to figure out new approaches to push them ahead of the curve.”
The team proposed four distinct policies that, if executed properly, could cut hate groups off at the knees:
Ban numerous small hate clusters rather than a few large ones. The idea is that abundant small groups are easier to locate, and eliminating them prevents the emergence of other large clusters.
Ban small numbers of users selected at random from online hate clusters. This random-targeting approach avoids potential violations of privacy regulations.
Promote the organization of anti-hate clusters. These groups could serve as a “human immune system” to fight and counteract haters.
Introduce an artificial group of users to encourage interactions between hate clusters with opposing views. Researchers hope the members will battle out their differences among themselves, instead of taking their anger out on the public.
The latter two would require little direct intervention by platform administrators.
Study authors are aware, however, that setting opposing clusters against each other “would require meticulous engineering.”
“We set out to get to the bottom of online hate by looking at why it is so resilient and how it can be better tackled,” Johnson said. “Instead of love being in the air, we found hate is in the ether.”
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Source: https://www.geek.com/tech/try-these-four-policies-to-dismantle-online-hate-groups-1801293/?source
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Stephanie Mlot
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