Politically-engaged Redditors tend to be more toxic – even in non-political subreddits::A new study links partisan activity on the Internet to widespread online toxicity, revealing that politically-engaged users exhibit uncivil behavior even in non-political discussions. The findings are based on an analysis of hundreds of millions of comments from over 6.3 million Reddit users.
Really curious about the tool they used to quantify “toxicity/disruptive” comments. My initial suspicion would be that political commentary, regardless of human-perceived toxicity, might be biased toward “toxic” by an automated sentiment analysis.
In short: I am suspicious that automated tooling exists to reliably distinguish between toxic and non-toxic political discourse.
We also have to deal with the fact that toxicity has become an almost meaningless label. The way we seem to apply it now, feels like we’d say there was a lot of “toxicity” around the time of the Civil Rights Movement, too. Or even the Civil War.
We’ve conflated “angry, hateful, bitter, disruptive, belittling” with “caring enough to get upset”. There’s been study after study trying to blame social media for the rise in “political toxicity”, and every last single one of them seems to want to sweetly ignore the context of the moment in time we’re living in.
People are acting volatile because there are a lot of volatile events happening that directly affect people’s lives. And all these high-minded discussions about how people online are so mean and rude, or how people don’t listen to each other anymore, consistently sidestep that very crucial piece of context.
So I ask, what do we mean by “toxic”? Because I have a strong feeling a good deal of women were being real “toxic” on June 24 2022. Why is the story not about why? And why does that deserve to be grouped in with the same toxicity comes from the people responsible?