Robert
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Those of you on the video side of it will see it right now.
I'll describe it in a second.
But this graph...
represents communication patterns between different nodes of the pro-anorexia community, showing how users could start from a single website with a relatively mild pro-eating disorder stance to escape censorship, so something that's soft enough that it's not going to get banned, but from that source get connected to nodes with much more and much more extreme content.
And you see how this happens kind of the way that it's called the toothpaste tube effect in part because it kind of looks like you've got a big mass on one end and like a tiny chunk of like the initial nods on the other.
And it looks like they've been squeezed in the middle to like push the big glob out.
Right.
That's kind of where the name comes from.
Now.
The authors of that paper wrote of the sites that has successfully escaped attempts at censorship, survival involves turning inwards as these communities become more entrenched.
Survivors control major flows of information within clusters, but do not bridge them.
In terms of information circulation, that favors redundancy.
Subgroups of pro-anorexia bloggers will exchange messages, links, and images among themselves and exclude other information sources.
Consequently, any health information or awareness campaign is now less likely to reach out to pro-anorexia bloggers.
If in 2010 such a campaign would target the websites in the middle of the graph so that they relay the message to the margins, in 2012 the middle is virtually deserted, and the chances of spreading public health-relevant information are lower.
Now, again, this has all come to be known as the toothpaste tube effect.
But what that means is that there's a documented history of attempts to crack down on digital subcultures that just turns those subcultures more extreme and makes them more resilient to positive intervention.
And we definitely see this within cells.
In the wake of...
These initial killing sprees, there are numerous attempts to ban incel content, right?