
Visualizing Toxicity in Twitter Conversations - betolink
https://medium.com/cortico/visualizing-toxicity-in-twitter-conversations-3cd336e5db81
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chroma
The visualization doesn't interest me nearly as much as how Twitter classifies
something as "toxic". It seems subjective enough that one person's "toxic
conversation" is another person's "sick burn". Unfortunately, the post doesn't
contain any explanation or links regarding their classification algorithm(s).

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dev_dull
I was curious about their definition as well. Our world is so hyper political
and polarized that the definition of “toxic” and “hate speech” varies widely
depending on your political ideology. There’s zero space left in the middle.

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dijit
holding a middle ground is frowned upon on the internet.

I've confirmed this myself by writing torridly on occasion and for sites which
allow voting (such as HN/Reddit) I am rewarded.

When I make a nuanced, balanced and reasoned reply I am punished.

I bring this up because on twitter there is no 'disagree' button, there is
only shouting at your enemy in 280 characters, that used to be 140 characters,
enough that you can never actually make a reasoned assertion about anything.

I still have my twitter account, it's a shame to remove it because I have a
good handle- but I can't escape the blatant fact that it is only inhabited by
bullies. Both sides of a weirdly distorted political spectrum
drumming/repeating their own rhetoric to each other -- and anyone who might
try to strike a balance is seen as an enemy by both sides of the extreme.

The extremes of twitter almost caused me to hate feminism, A cause I actually
have always agreed with. In turn it also caused me to hate ideologues who
espouse fears of restricted freedoms/end of privacy. Which I also agree with.

Twitter is _not_ a place to go to have a conversation, it's a place where a
conversation is thrust upon you if you speak, whether you want it or not.

I'm writing this because I agree with you. I've had a growing resentment for
twitter due to the blatant, crushing pile-on that it allows.

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guscost
Eh, I think you’re experiencing something else. Moderation and hedging phrases
seem more like blue-chip stocks in the internet points risk/reward game.
You’re almost guaranteed not to lose _that_ many points with a stance fewer
folks will brigade, and if you hit the right tone, odds are you’ll get a
modest reward for pitching in. Picking a side and going all-out on some
cultish activism is more like a venture capital penny-stock situation. With a
perfect storm of the right audience, day, etc, you could get a huge internet
karma ROI! And the other times, you lose everything.

YMMV of course, a lot depends on how “rational” the “market” happens to be.

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nopriorarrests
Definition of "toxicity" is nowhere to be found in this post. Plenty of cool
pictures, though.

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jacobwilliamroy
Someone needs to write a joke medium article from the perspective of Winston
Smith. "Unpersoning thought criminals with AWS"

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caspervonb
So toxic, but what defines toxic, how were they categorised etc? Just can't
take the term seriously anymore after all the buzzfeed videos educating me on
American politics that's been shoved into my feeds.

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jaimex2
Yup, they've muddied the waters, possibly on purpose.

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transitivebs
For a more formal definition of "toxic", see these research efforts by Google
and Kaggle, respectively:

[https://perspectiveapi.com/](https://perspectiveapi.com/)
[https://www.kaggle.com/c/jigsaw-toxic-comment-
classification...](https://www.kaggle.com/c/jigsaw-toxic-comment-
classification-challenge)

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skybrian
It seems unfortunate that the goal was to build a good internal marketing
video, rather than a useful user interface that could be used for navigating
Twitter?

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throwaway48274
The final viz looks awful. In the attempt to make it look like a tree, you did
get a tree but lost the informational value. I thought the earlier iterations
had less noise and more signal.

There are plenty of books on visualization theory. Exposes pitfalls.

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transitivebs
This is an awesome related API by Google:
[https://perspectiveapi.com/](https://perspectiveapi.com/)

Also check out this Kaggle competition: [https://www.kaggle.com/c/jigsaw-
toxic-comment-classification...](https://www.kaggle.com/c/jigsaw-toxic-
comment-classification-challenge)

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TACIXAT
Red and green are not a great choice for color blind people.

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dev_dull
It’s amazing to me that people look at an online community such as twitter and
then determine if it’s toxic or not based on observed behaviors. They’re just
people. People are toxic on twitter. Twitter is not toxic. Twitter is exactly
the way that people who use it want it to be.

How do you expect to change twitter without changing people? It’s an exercise
in futility. You can regulate it for eternity and it will still reflect the
people who use and engage in the site.

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ggreer
The same people can behave totally differently depending on circumstances. For
example: many people experience road rage, but they'd never behave that way
outside of their car. Something about being in a car separated by a couple
panes of glass causes a lot of people to act insane. It's similar for social
media:

\- Twitter and Tumblr both have retweet/reblog with commentary, which makes it
extremely convenient for people to tell their followers about something they
dislike. Just click retweet, type, "Look at this dumbass.", and watch the
likes come in.

\- Twitter notifies you if someone replied, quote-tweeted, mentioned you, or
linked to a tweet of yours. This means that people definitely know when
somebody disagrees with or dislikes them. If those same people were mocking
them on some other forum, they'd never know and a cycle of hostility wouldn't
form.

\- Twitter's character limit makes it hard for people to keep nuance in their
ideas. Replies to tweets are sorted by time, so whoever replies first (i.e.
gives their response the least thought) gets the most eyeballs.

\- Lastly, Twitter defaults to only accept direct messages from people you
follow, meaning that most people can't criticize in private. They have to
broadcast the criticism to the whole world, making it much harder for both
parties to keep their egos in check.

These "features" combine to make civil conversation all but impossible.

~~~
majos
All good points. One I would add: there is far less assumption of good faith
from strangers on Twitter, and most parts of the internet in general.

For whatever reason, in-person interactions have a level of charity in them.
You'll clarify misconceptions, give people the chance to make and walk back
mistakes, and generally assume that your conversational partner is reasonable
until proven otherwise.

Twitter is not like this. Many people seem to find it very easy to start a
conversation with criticism, looking for evidence of stupidity or malice
rather than trying to clarify it away. And there is almost no ground-level
assumption that the other person is actually "trying" the way you are.

Seems easily traced back to Twitter not being a very human medium. As in the
car example, it's easier to strongly dislike something when it's not obviously
another human. But of course, the existence of trolls on the internet and
mostly nonexistence of tolls in everyday life is a factor too.

For this reason, I've mostly given up on having any kind of remotely grey-area
discussion on Twitter. I just use it to follow a few dozen people whose
thoughts I'm interested in. And outside of HN and email/messaging, I don't
talk through the internet at all.

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ptd
Awesome project. Always interesting to see original ideas in data
visualization.

