I know most people that were on reddit at the time are fully aware of this and won’t be surprised but don’t dismiss the findings out of hand. It’s important that studies are being conducted and the fact that the finding match our lived experience is still noteworthy.
If you ever want to observe or engage (be ready for the pile-up) with these same folks, r/ShitPoliticsSays contains the exact same user-base of extremists. These are dyed-in-the-wool folks because they use this as a launching-point for brigading other subs comment threads. Lots of Canadian righties there, too. The only credit I’ll give is unlike r/conservative that they never censored so you could pretty much discuss and test argumentative points to your heart’s content.
Just read the thread covering this very article about T_D lol
Of course I still think a sizable chunk of these folks operate in discord channels and astroturfed Sanders subs (especially the 2020 election), ChapoTrapHouse, etc.
No. Fucking. Shit.
Any and I do mean, any conservative based subreddit all now function the same. r/conservatives have turned into a shithole. Hell, even TrueUnpopularOpinion has turned into it’s own shithole because it’s just a foundation for right-wingers to express their radicalized thought processes for all to see.
r/unpopularopinion was a shithole. Any sub called “realXYZ” “QRS2” or “TrueABC” is just the “free speech” version started by someone pissed that they got banned for using slurs, so I’m not surprised r/TrueUnpopularOpinion went to shit. I’m surprised you think it was decent at any point tbh.
There were a couple “trues” that actually had a purpose and were actively less shitty than the original one. The games and gaming subs were mostly memes and fan boys being assholes, but truegaming was for longer form discussion and memes weren’t allowed.
I remember TrueGaming having such a stingy requirement, like they wouldn’t have allowed you to post for a month. It was dumb but I understood. It’s no longer there.
Yeah r/gaming is a shitfest, you can’t have an honest engaging conversation about games. It’s always about sensationalist takes, cosplayer females dressing sexually to appeal to the lonely losers who frequent there, rage porn for like 2 weeks, unfunny memes and junk posts like “REMAKE THIS ONE GAME ONLY I REMEMBURH! COME ON, I PRETEND TO UNDERSTAND BUSINESS! THIS WILL RAKE IN SO MUCH MONEY!”
And the same person will pull a two-face and condemn the industry for practicing what they think is bad business, while simultaneously STILL PAYING FOR THE SHIT THEY THINK IS THE PROBLEM!
Hypocritical pieces of shit are what that community is.
Yeah, I’ve always described r/Conservative as The_Donald dressed up in their dad’s suit and tie. But once The_Donald was finally banned (after they already left for their own website - thanks for nothing spez) r/Conservative dropped all pretenses.
R/republican was a right wing echo bunker, too. I got banned for pointing out that the letter in the “article” that someone posted that claimed that the DOJ had found massive voter fraud in Georgia and asking the state to reject Biden’s win was actually written by a Trumpist shill and contradicted the Republican AG, the DOJ, the Republican Governor, the Republican Secretary of State, and Republican election officials.
I asked them a couple of times when major events in the prosecution of John Eastman occurred if they would reconsider. They blocked me for 30 days each time. When he was finally disbarred I asked again and they told me that if I didn’t stop asking they would report me to the admins.
Delicate little snowflakes in their echo bunker.
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Did it actually radicalize, or just take the mask off? They may have used vocabularies they always wanted to.
Using an original dataset of Reddit user posting histories from 2015–2017, I test for increases in the frequency of this far-right vocabulary.
I think there’s a lot to be discussed on the topic but I wouldn’t put much on this methodology.
Did it actually radicalize, or just take the mask off?
When a community allows you to feel comfortable “taking the mask off” and embracing your inner bigot that is radicalization. So yes, The_Donald did radicalize people. Your comment is an attempt to highlight a distinction without a functional difference.
I guess you could define radicalization like that, but I’d define it as taking regular Joe with no hate and you know radicalizing them.
Radicalization (or radicalisation) is the process by which an individual or a group comes to adopt increasingly radical views in opposition to a political, social, or religious status quo.
Yeah I think there’s a difference between radicalization and mask off.
“Increasingly” is the key word there, pal.
Adopting is the key word actually. Mask off is revealing it.
There is no one key word. They all kind of intermingle to explain the whole idea. Picking and choosing which word you feel most comfortably explains your own opinion doesn’t make it right.
Honestly, before now, this is what I had implicitly assumed was going on. I’m not American, and I had blocked most of this trash when it was happening, but my impression was that these ignorant people were just “coming out of the woodwork” so to speak.
Of course, fear and hate are learned behaviors, but it’s interesting to me to see that these people were actually being quantifiably radicalized by that website in particular, and they weren’t simply bringing views to the platform that were being established elsewhere.
People are emotional creatures. And in a place where a type of view is being actively promoted, it’s very easy to align those emotions in that specific direction.
An example here on Lemmy is ACAB. It’s anti-police and it posts the bad stuff that’s meant to show ACAB. They might say it shows the truth and people going through All, watching the videos and reading the articles might start thinking, huh cops seem bad. They keep going, read statistics and articles posted by other commenters and driven by this information, they eventually end up saying ACAB. Suddenly, anyone not saying ACAB is complicit, an enemy, a troll, part of the problem etc.
It’s the same for any politically charged social hub. It’s not just people who had the views but lacked a place to vent them, but people who are ignorant on the subject and are radicalized through emotional outrage. Emotional opinions are the hardest to change because the investment in them is the greatest.
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Radicalization happens yes, it’s a question of The Donald specifically doing it. It’s not so big that many people will just randomly stumble into it like Fox (which is passive and 24/7). People have to kinda seek the sub out and engage. At that point they were probably quietly, let’s just say, racist. So I put that in the category of mask off. I know people they could do that.
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I did read the portion accessible, I quoted it in my original comment.
I would’ve been curious to see what kinds of words got counted as “far-right vocabulary” but it appears that research has recently gone back to being effectively concealed behind paywalls for those of us not in academia.
Why are we downvoting this comment? It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to wonder about the study, and I had the same thought.
Not because I can’t possibly imagine what could constitute “far right vocabulary…” But just cause I’m interested in the study methodology.
Like yeah, any of us can often identify far-right language when we see it… But how did the researchers approach that systematically? Are there any surprises there, like phrases that I wouldn’t recognize? Did they include patterns like “randomly capitalizing words for emphasis?” That would be interesting to know.
Or maybe I misunderstood, and the people downvoting are just pro-paywall, idk.
Some people seem to be more concerned with this study “feeling” correct more than it actually being verifiably correct.
It’s 2024, anyone feigning ignorance about what constitutes a “far-right vocabulary” is just being disingenuous.
One can assume, yes. But that’s not especially scientific, is it? What’s the point of the research if you can’t look at the methodology?
Someone else defended the post from people saying “well d’uh” by saying we need to corroborate our theories and not just assume they’re correct. Kind of hard to do when research is hidden behind paywalls.
Was going to say this same thing to back you up. We can’t both defend this “obvious” study by saying “it’s good to have data to back it up!” And then simultaneously argue against having data because it’s “too obvious”.
I completely agree, a study like this is as good as worthless without disclosing the list of words, or the methodology used for testing words (if they are stored in a latent space rather than a list, for example).
Oh, hey! Come on now!
They could just be really, really stupid.
Speaking of online extremism, imagine calling someone stupid for wanting to read a scientific paper before forming an opinion about it.
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That’s not really true. Anyway, the “supplementary material” provides a few examples at least. We can only assume that they should be representative and that care was taken in drawing the boundary between that sort of thing and less objectionable but culturally adjacent terms.
Good find, thanks.
“Gamer precursor” is a bit of a surprise. I know gaming communities can be toxic, but it seems like the odd one out in a list with “conspiracy, racist, violent, sexist, and offensive.”
“Gamer precursor” is a bit of a surprise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(harassment_campaign)
Yes lol I’ve heard of Gamergate. But I still don’t think “far right” when I hear “gamer.” It wouldn’t shock me to learn that they correlate to some degree, but whereas the other precursors sound per se characteristic of the far right to me, “gamer” seems like an odd fit.
Like lots of people from a broad range of backgrounds would describe themselves as gamers, and that’s generally uncontroversial. Not the same for any other precursor in that list.
Hence, surprised.
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To all the people rushing to sarcastically comment how surprised they are: Yes, we all saw it happen. But…
It’s important that studies are being conducted and the fact that the finding match our lived experience is still noteworthy.
This is why OP posted it. Science isn’t feelings, you need data.
Science is feelings
Typo? 🤣
Seriously 😮💨 science is literally the opposite of something vague like “feelings”
Could be social commentary on what passes as “science” on social media these days. 🤣 That’s what made me laugh.
Yes
While it certainly is a bit of a captain obvious moment that exposure to far-right echo chambers helped radicalise vulnerable people into the far-right, but I can see the merit in having empirical evidence supporting what we see (as OP said) - it is a lot easier to dismiss an andecdote than statistical evidence
Remember when they lifted the no racism rule? I do.
Reddit or the sub?
The Donald.
It was a hilarious mask of movement. They did it to “own” /r/Sweden in the subwars and obviously got their asses handed to them.
Yes. And I really should have left Reddit then and never looked back.
We 'member.
Literally everyone on Reddit could see this except spez, who is a greedy little pigboy
Extremists are engagement.
I really wonder if the nouveau rich tech startup boys look around and realize that their greed is directly responsible for the 2016 election and by extension, the state of US domestic politics today, and feel even a tiny bit of guilt over it.
Probably not.
Why would they feel guilt regarding something they wanted to do?
See, I don’t think that. I think they are power hungry, sure. But I don’t think they ever realized the power that their product would grant them. It’s totally unprecedented. They get right into our brain and tickle our dopamine receptors while they mess with everything else.
I don’t think they expected or were prepared to yield that type of power, at all. I really feel like Zuck et al accidentally stumbled into being a supervillain. Like some sick Mr. Bean skit.
But that’s not true I’ve heard it straight from the tech-bros mouth. They build these technologies to help us, the little people. To spread peace and love and build deeper connections with the people that we love. I’m sure that they feel pain and guilt that they have to deposit those large checks into their bank accounts. /s
I don’t think that’s how they’re wired. If anything, they’d be excited to learn they’re a couple of million dollars of AI astroturfing from being able to choose the president.
Oh he could see it too and didn’t care because he’s a self proclaimed libertarian.
What’s a right wing libertarian other than a fascist so selfish they aren’t concerned or swayed by ideas of nationalism or “heritage”. But they’ll happily enable and march with the ones who are. When their self interest aligns. They just want to be the ones on top.
They’re mostly just conservatives who like drugs.
Be fair. They’re also conservatives who are more open about not wanting the age of consent to be a thing. Which also explains the sub spez used to moderate.
There are only three kinds of libertarians:
- Likes drugs and naive about economics.
- Hates minorities and understands economics but naive as fuck about NAP.
- Pedophile.
One cannot be an active thedonald user without already being a white nationalist.
Any dissent gets an instant permaban.
Any dissent gets an instant permaban.
So just like r/conservative? I only commented there once and was instantly permabanned. It was a while ago. Deinately before Trump was president, maybe 2015. Maybe earlier.
I kinda watched the political climate change drastically since 2015. Statring form Trumps presidency to spreading all over America, Europe and the world. And I wonder where this came from in such masses. Russian efforts and paid propagandists? They can’t be THAT powerful, can they? It is insane and it spreads everywhere. Into every corner of the world. I don’t understand it. People seem to want authoritarian leadership. Have they all lost their minds?
Not defending Russia, the us wrote the book on election interference. To act like it’s not possible now is insane. American exceptionalism is the biggest hoax. The GOP is now banking on the us letting Putin win. They’ve sold us down the river with fanciful delusion that they will get to rule the ashes and install their Christo-fascist bullshit.
This won’t make Spez any more uncomfortable when he wants to sleep at night. According to him, that subreddit was “valuable discussion”.
The same thing is happening here with Hexbear and .ml to the other direction.
Even in a thread about nazis over on reddit, you punch left.
Literally any thread on Lemmy
.ee user shows up to whine about .ml
.ee users proceed to tankie for israel all over the place
You’re legendarily wrong here time and again, and probably the most banned for misinformation, and you cast aspersions at me?
How about this- you call me a “tankie for Israel” and I’ll call you a “tankie for Trump” and we’ll both agree on mutually assured destruction.
Hmmmm?
You just showed up on a thread about reddit to whine that some lemmy users aren’t far enough to the right for you.
I’ll show up on a thread about anything to call out propagandists when I see them. You of all people should know this- since you follow me around wherever I go.
I thought you said you blocked me. Guess that was another filthy lie.
Again, this thread is about reddit bein’ fulla nazis, not about how you’re angry that people to your left exist on lemmy.
What this thread is about is irrelevant. Propaganda is propaganda. I’ll call it out every time I see it. That you call yourself a “leftist” is irrelevant.
That people seeing you for what you are…. Isn’t.
And I can block and unblock you as many times as I wish. Until your kind wins in November, I remain free to do as I wish from the comfort of my own home.
What this thread is about is irrelevant. Propaganda is propaganda.
And what propaganda have I spread on this thread? Quote it.
I’ll call it out every time I see it.
And every time you imagine it. I think there are tankies under your bed.
And I can block and unblock you as many times as I wish.
lol you wanted to leave our last conversation in a huff but couldn’t commit.
Do you do anything other than punch left? Lol. Of course Lemmy is going to have Leftists, it was made by Marxist-Leninists along Communist principles. You are the one picking Lemmy over Reddit, here.
Yes, that’s why nazi digg kept them around.
