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.
It’s all about living in a silo. Surround yourself with one side, and there’s no other direction to go but further down your side.
Weak, all of them
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.
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.
Reddit or the sub?
The Donald.
We 'member.
Yes. And I really should have left Reddit then and never looked back.
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
4chan was pure weaponized autism in those days. They still call Trump “The meme president”.
weaponized autism?
They’ve very much revealed that they come straight from 4chan.
r/The_Donald helped
radicalizeextremify users into far-right identities and discourse – Active users on r/The_Donald increasingly used white nationalist vocabularies in their comments within three months.FTFT. I so hate it when people who should know better ignore the actual meaning of terms.
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.
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.
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.
The studies are still important
i thought the donald got banned, guess there’s a new the Donald.
Please read the link! It’s a study of that time on Reddit when the Donald was growing rapidly.
read the link
Blasphemy!
thanks for the info, i will be potentially forgetting it .
yeah, but i’m sure theres plenty of other subreddits doing the same shit. Reddit doesnt get rid of bad actors, it just redistributes them.
I would be extremely interested if things changed after the sub went private.
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.
To add on to the people pointing out that science is data:
Yes, it is incredibly obvious that the turmp fanclub subreddit would radicalize people to become white nationalists.
What is not obvious is that this is happening everywhere. And, if you get a hold of one of the “leaked” white supremacist recruiting guides from the 80s and 90s, that is by design.
South Park Libertarians and all but it really is telling how many people, to this day, insist that the f-slur for gay people is really “Oh, we took that back. it means obnoxious motorcycle drivers”. Let alone statements like “har har, you are so butthurt” that (regardless of what urban dictionary says) are on the same level as “ha ha, you are gay”
We see it every day. And it makes communities hostile. And if you call it out, you get driven out. Which means there are fewer people around to say “… what the fuck? How can we think this is acceptable?”. And then someone whose entire vocabulary is “lolzors go woke go broke pepe pepe” gets rightfully made fun of elsewhere and now they are a victim and all those “for the lolz” become their identity.
the f-slur can’t be reclaimed for me, personally, I’m happy for those who do reclaim it but its just too painful as it’s what I got called when I was badly hurt and was worried I would die as a 12 year old.
However, those who do reclaim it then use it around me, which just makes me think about what happened - involuntarily - and ruins my day (or part of it).
It’s also tricky being a bi man in a het relationship in this regard, as if someone knows that it’s hard to overcome their feelings that due to my partners existence, I now no longer have a say in these matters.
Yes, it is incredibly obvious that the turmp fanclub subreddit would radicalize people to become white nationalists.
They’re polarizing and definitely hateful.
But as the volume got cranked higher and higher, I think it encouraged more silent disgust than popular approval.
You just couldn’t see it under all the pro-Trump spam.
And then someone whose entire vocabulary is “lolzors go woke go broke pepe pepe” gets rightfully made fun of elsewhere and now they are a victim and all those “for the lolz” become their identity.
The online Shoot And Cry strategy. Always be the victim.
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.
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.
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.
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.
