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The subreddit r/WatchRedditDie was founded in 2015 after reddit started implementing anti-harassment policies, and positions itself as a “fire alarm for reddit” meant to voyeuristically watch reddit’s impending (symbolic) death. As conversations around platform governance, moderation, and the role of platforms in controlling hate speech become more complex, r/WatchRedditDie and its affiliated subreddits are dedicated in maintaining a version of reddit tolerant of any and all speech, excluding other more vulnerable users from fully participating on the platform. r/WatchReditDie users advocate for no interference in their activities on the platform—meaning that although they rely on the reddit infrastructure to sustain their community, they aim to self-govern to uphold a libertarian and often manipulated interpretation of free expression. Responding to reddit’s evolving policies, they find community with one another by positioning the platform itself as their main antagonist. Through the social worlds framework, I examine the r/WatchRedditDie community’s responses to platform change, bringing up new questions about the possibility of shared governance between platform and user, as well as participatory culture’s promises and perils.

In this paper we explore quarantining as a more ethical method for delimiting the spread of Hate Speech via online social media platforms. Currently, companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google generally respond reactively to such material: offensive messages that have already been posted are reviewed by human moderators if complaints from users are received. The offensive posts are only subsequently removed if the complaints are upheld; therefore, they still cause the recipients psychological harm. In addition, this approach has frequently been criticised for delimiting freedom of expression, since it requires the service providers to elaborate and implement censorship regimes. In the last few years, an emerging generation of automatic Hate Speech detection systems has started to offer new strategies for dealing with this particular kind of offensive online material. Anticipating the future efficacy of such systems, the present article advocates an approach to online Hate Speech detection that is analogous to the quarantining of malicious computer software. If a given post is automatically classified as being harmful in a reliable manner, then it can be temporarily quarantined, and the direct recipients can receive an alert, which protects them from the harmful content in the first instance. The quarantining framework is an example of more ethical online safety technology that can be extended to the handling of Hate Speech. Crucially, it provides flexible options for obtaining a more justifiable balance between freedom of expression and appropriate censorship.

Social Media has become an important source for information about people and real-world events. Its importance is driven largely by the enormous number of people generating and updating content in Social Media platforms. In this report, we measure the extent to which we can accurately measure the salience of topics/concepts that might be of interest to an analyst, and evaluate whether concepts like positive and negative sentiment can be meaningfully extracted from Social Media content. As a test case, we examined Twitter content generated by female users who are sympathetic to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The basic technique proposed here can be developed further to create a more fine-grained exanimation of Social Media content.

This study uses a quantitative natural-language processing tool, the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC), to evaluate the content of all Q drops over time, focusing on language themes associated with three core principles of psychological influence: cognitive, emotional, and social processes. Before detailing this study, we situate it within the broader contexts of national security and the social psychology of influence literature.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

VOX-Pol Blog post.