Study Suggests Assholes Online Are Routinely Assholes Offline

from the mirror-mirror-on-the-wall dept

A new study published in the American Science Review found that that if you're an asshole troll online, there's a pretty good chance that you're the same way in the brick and mortar world. The researchers used representative surveys and behavioral studies from the U.S. and Denmark to try and figure out if it the novel and relatively new internet was somehow making normal human beings more hostile. But as the researchers point out on Twitter, they found no real evidence for that:

In short if you're a hostile person online, you're probably a hostile person offline. And while Facebook has a lot of obvious problems on a wide variety of fronts, it's not inherently responsible for somehow creating human dysfunction that already existed. The researchers told Engineering and Technology that online debates seem more hostile because the hostile players simply have a bigger bullhorn, and the resulting chaos they create has much broader visibility than it would in the offline world:

"Our research shows that the reason many people feel that online political discussions are so hostile has to do with the visibility of aggressive behaviour online. Online discussions occur in large public networks and the behaviour of an internet troll is much more visible than the behaviour of this same person in an offline setting,” said Michael Bang Petersen, professor of political science at the university."

Obviously none of this is to say online platforms don't have responsibility to do a better job protecting users from violence, hostility, racism, or general jackassery. Nor does this mean the ad-based internet ecosystem -- be it the press or social media -- doesn't have a problem with amplifying inflammatory bullshit, resulting in numerous business models where inflammatory bullshit is more profitable than boring old factual reality.

But it does suggest that terrible people are inherently terrible, in contrast to the claim on some fronts that the internet is magically creating them. As Gizmodo notes, research fairly consistently suggests "toxic online political discussions are disproportionately driven by malicious individuals taking advantage of the megaphone offered":

"One study published in the Personality and Individual Differences journal in 2017 found that the most aggressive online trolls may tend to be high in cognitive empathy, which allows them to identify when they’re pushing someone else’s buttons, but low in affective empathy, enabling them to avoid feeling bad or internalizing the suffering they cause. Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard affiliate and data engineer Devin Gaffney wrote for Bennington Magazine that as platforms have “optimized for connectedness, they have negligently optimized for the growth of mob-like communities connecting around noxious yet identity-defining goals.” One 2018 study in the International Journal of Public Opinion Research found a bleed-over effect in which nasty online comments “increase perceived bias in a news blog post to which they are connected,” essentially dragging down the whole discussion with them."

Again, the internet clearly creates a wide swath of new problems we'll need to overcome through scientific and democratic processes with the hindsight of experience. And it's abundantly clear that process is going to be downright ugly at times. But again, it's not the internet mystically creating armies of assholes; it's just a broader window into -- and amplifier for -- the parades of assholes that were already there.

Filed Under: anonymity, assholes, behavior, trolls

Jerks 'Reporting' Women Who Swipe Left On Them In Tinder, Once Again Highlighting How Content Moderation Gets Abused

from the always-another-thing dept

We keep trying to highlight (over and over and over again) how content moderation at scale is impossible to do well for a variety of reasons -- and one big one is the fact that assholes and trolls will game whatever system you put in place -- often in truly absurd ways. The latest example of this is that guys who are pissed off about women who reject them after meeting through Tinder are "reporting" the women in the app, trying to get their accounts shut down.

I had been banned from Tinder. It turns out, though, I’m far from the only woman to have been kicked off the app for no other reason than I rejected the wrong guy. Indeed, without the need for any apparent proof of wrongdoing, a new breed of scorned men have stumbled upon a particularly passive-aggressive way to say, “If I can’t have her, no one can” — tapping the report button.

Case in point: Last year, 33-year-old Amy declined to go out with a man she’d been messaging with when he started insulting her. The insults, of course, only intensified from there — with him telling her she was shaped like Slimer from Ghostbusters and that her fertility was declining. Stunned, she put her phone away. After taking a moment, she went to block him, but when she opened Tinder, her account had been banned.

Of course, as some of the article highlights, Tinder itself seems woefully (ridiculously) unprepared to deal with even the most basic instances of this kind of abuse. Tinder apparently bans accounts based on a single report and the company states that it does "not offer an appeals process at this time." The article highlights a bunch of tweets from women who all seem to have gone through a similar experience. They met a dude on Twitter, date doesn't go well, she says she'd rather not go on another date... the guy flips out, acts like an asshole, and minutes later, she's banned from the app.

The author of the article, who herself was banned from Tinder right after such an experience, found a guy who admitted to doing this.

I did, though, find one man — 26-year-old Brian — who admitted to reporting women who were unresponsive to his messages. “I’ve done this,” he confides. “It’s a huge waste of time for girls to match with you and then not reply. Like what’s the point?”

He then goes on to spout a bunch of misogynistic nonsense, apparently believing that women do this on purpose to be mean to men like him, which apparently is what he needs to convince himself that getting their accounts shut down okay.

Of course, what's left out of this discussion is a bit of the flipside. You can kind of understand why Tinder is so aggressive in banning people, because if people actually are violating its rules, the consequences could be a lot more serious, especially given that the entire point of the app is to get people to meet up in real life. If they mess that up, there will be all sorts of bad press about how Tinder failed to take down an account or something. Hell, as we've detailed, Grindr effectively got sued over this exact scenario and the plaintiff in that case recently asked the Supreme Court to hear his appeal.

That's not to say the companies can't do a better job -- they can. Having an appeals process seems like a no-brainer. But an appeals process can be gamed as well. And this is the point that we keep trying to make: it's literally impossible to do content moderation well at this kind of scale. There will always be problems and judgment calls people disagree with -- and outright abuse. In both directions. People abusing the system to take down content they don't like, and others abusing the system to keep up content or profiles that probably should be taken down. It's easy for someone to say "oh, they shouldn't do that," but no one has yet come up with a system that always gets it right and stops any such abuse. Because it's literally impossible.

Filed Under: appeals, assholes, content moderation, content moderation at scale, dating, reporting, trolls
Companies: tinder