
The Web Centipede: Understanding How Web Communities Influence Each Other - lainon
https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.06947
======
wolco
The emergence of mainstream social networks like Twitter and Facebook makes it
easier for misleading, false, and agenda driven information to quickly and
seamlessly spread online, deceiving people or influencing their opinions.

There has always been misleading information. Local TV news promos always tell
you to stay tuned to hear about x at 6pm only to find out x really meant y.

What we see now is the decentralization of media and it's influences.

~~~
wyager
Hopefully the fact that deception is now obvious will cause people to re-
evaluate the way they use their trust networks. I hope in the future that
people use trust graphs as a way to estimate the reliability of a claim they
see from an unknown party.

~~~
CuriousSkeptic
A trust graph is essentially an ad hominem though.

What if we instead could provide the tools to establish a soundness graph.
Evaluate arguments on their own merits rather than their source.

Even Arguments based on false premises can be sound. Just as arguments can be
based on true premises and still be unsound. Helping people identify which is
which should at least raise the quality of disagreements.

~~~
gr__or
_Even Arguments based on false premises can be sound. Just as arguments can be
based on true premises and still be unsound. Helping people identify which is
which should at least raise the quality of disagreements._

When its premises are false, an argument is always unsound. But it can still
be valid. A sound argument is one that is both valid and has true premises.

About builiding a soundness/validity graph, I've dabbled with building a
webapp for that (though the graph is more implied than visual). It's still
very basic, but if someone has ideas where exactly it should go or how it
could be engaging to a community of critical thinkers, please contact me.

[https://arguably.herokuapp.com/](https://arguably.herokuapp.com/)

[http://github.com/gregoor/arguably](http://github.com/gregoor/arguably)

~~~
CuriousSkeptic
Thanks for the correction. Will certainly have a look at the app

My own thinking is that it has to be less of an app and more of a
protocol/federated thing augmenting existing channels. Think something like a
github bot doing automated reviews with an SO-like community of meta-data
authors annotating news articles and such

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flipp3r
> Our results indicate that alt-right communities within 4chan and Reddit can
> have a surprising level of influence on Twitter

It's also common for 4chan users to have accounts elsewhere, just to force
memes or opinions. It's super easy to create multiple Twitter accounts and
just start posting away.

You can't do this on 4chan with the same level of effectiveness. You can't
target a user directly, and there's a lot of obscure culture that you will
have to understand to properly communicate and not be outed as a shill by the
community. Plus, there's no incentive to post for people who are used to
Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. You're not gaining followers, you'll never get
upvotes, you'll never get likes. I believe this is why the other networks will
never influence 4chan the same way.

Plus, people are just plain offensive on 4chan, which can be scary if you're
not used to it. I remember when there were raids on Tumblr with gore images,
and Tumblr users responded by going to 4chan and posting back gore. They only
ended up traumatizing themselves.

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gwern
'centipede' is a rather pointed choice of title. So it's a centipede... of
humans... with BS news flowing constantly between them...

~~~
have_faith
It comes from a very old image that floated around on 4chan as long as 8 years
ago[0]. In a funny way it depicted how memes and information is spread between
the various networks online. I think lots of people from 4chan have understood
for a long time how these large digital networks interact with each other and
ultimate they later realised how to exploit this over the years.

[0] There are various versions, some include Facebook etc:
[https://i.imgur.com/aAlOTA8.png](https://i.imgur.com/aAlOTA8.png)

~~~
clydethefrog
One of the authors also used a similar image when sharing the research on
twitter.

[https://twitter.com/jhblackb/status/866702758132559876](https://twitter.com/jhblackb/status/866702758132559876)

