r/The_Donald helped radicalize users into far-right identities and discourse – Active users on r/The_Donald increasingly used white nationalist vocabularies in their comments within three months.
journals.sagepub.com
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.
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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.
It's 2024, anyone feigning ignorance about what constitutes a "far-right vocabulary" is just being disingenuous.
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.
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).
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240511183257/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/1532673X241240429/suppl_file/sj-pdf-1-apr-10.1177_1532673X241240429.pdf
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."
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.
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.