
The Temporal Evolution of a Far-Right Forum - DyslexicAtheist
https://gnet-research.org/2020/03/05/the-temporal-evolution-of-a-far-right-forum/
======
nabla9
Tracking the evolution using only profanity or racial slurs misses real
changes.

There was interesting podcast about some researcher who has been studying the
evolution of trolling and 4chan, Breitbart etc. for a very long time. (If
someone can find her name it would be nice).

At the beginning it was almost completely edgy middle class teenage boys
enjoying using taboo words and writing forbidden comments and irritating and
shocking people. Trolling was just for fun. Getting into the news was major
win.

Teenage idiocy turned into real world brutality. Doxxing and real world harm.
People who are truly racist and have a political agenda joined. Mix of
creative trolls and far-right people works because when everything is taken as
irony people who are dead serious idiots can't be differentiated from edgy
teenagers.

~~~
RickJWagner
I get my news from a variety of sources, both left and right. (Bonus: Read
'RealClearPolitics' for both at once.)

I sometimes read Breitbart for a right-side source. I've seen lots of
definitely conservative content, but never anything that's off-color or out of
bounds. I'm just curious why you cite it here? Can you point out any examples
of anything that would be considered taboo, etc?

------
SiempreViernes
No really interestimg results, they just measured overall activity without
giving any reference for "neutral" forum behaviour in this summary.

Apparently no effort was made to track what they actually talked about, so its
hard to see any utility of this result for understandig extremism.

~~~
pnako
I think their methodology of measuring "extremist" content "through a
composite measure consisting of the frequency of profane words, racial slurs
and negative overall sentiment of the post" is flawed.

It will completely overweight places like 4chan, where potty-mouthed teenagers
and young adults like to be edgy, or sites like Facebook where boomers rant
about immigration or other social issues, while completely escaping real
extremist content like actual terrorist manifestos (e.g. the Unabomber
manifesto or Al Qaeda publications, which are not full of profane words and
racial slurs).

~~~
DanBC
Ironic racism is simply racism. Edgy teens on 4chan are racist edgy teens on
4chan, and they promote extremism.

~~~
pnako
The point I was trying to make is that the most extreme content (i.e. literal
terrorist manifestos) typically is _not_ full of racial slurs or similar
content. Look at the manifesto from the Christchurch shooter, for example. Not
a single racial slur.

In fact, it's entirely possible that, as a place becomes more serious/more
political (and thus perhaps more dangerous and indeed "extremist") you will
see the speech use fewer slurs or offensive speech. Thus if you wanted to
detect actual extremism you'll have to do much more in-depth analysis to try
and infer meaning. Probably with human analysts rather than a script counting
the number of n-words in a given week.

~~~
alphabettsy
This is exactly what politicians do. That’s where the term dog-whistle comes
into play because it’s not always clear what they’re talking about. “Jews will
not replace us” becomes “we’re concerned about maintaining our cultural
heritage”.

------
empath75
> Indeed, a mere 10% of users were responsible for more than 80% of posting
> activity, and 20% of the users accounted for almost 90% of posts

This is true on almost any forum.

~~~
jkingsbery
I remember seeing a talk from RubyConf a few years ago that showed open source
contributions follow the same pattern.

