this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
441 points (93.2% liked)

Technology

59974 readers
3507 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s
[email protected]
[email protected]
L4s
enu
441
Politically-engaged Redditors tend to be more toxic -- even in non-political subreddits (www.psypost.org)
submitted 1 year ago by L4s to c/technology
172 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Windex007 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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