Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: What are the findings about hate in online article comments?
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hello happy hump day welcome to the last show you'll learn a lot on tonight's program here are some of the topics we'll cover do you remember when movies and tv shows had real dogs horses even the occasional bear stealing scenes from humans now our furry friends are all pixels did cgi eat lassie in 10 minutes time we'll ask are animal actors going extinct or just being rendered
then the results are in based on a scientific study when is the appropriate time to stop eating before bed midnight snackers you'll want to brace yourself it's not in the order of minutes it's in the order of hours that later in the hour those are some of the topics we'll hit on the night show there will be more you will learn more but for now as ever let's dive in
On the internet, newspaper websites, when they introduced user comments, that promised a productive global conversation, right?
Chapter 3: Are animal actors being replaced by CGI in Hollywood?
Well, sometimes those comments feel like someone is throwing a chair in the first five seconds. They can get ugly. They can get angry. And it turns out the earliest people to comment on a thread might actually be the angriest. I'm here with someone who has researched just this. He is a communication studies professor at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. His name is Ben Clark.
Ben, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So you looked at a large number of online comments, some many, many millions.
Chapter 4: What insights does David Cooper share about sharing a common name?
What instincts did you have going in about what the angry, rude, hateful comments might be?
Yeah, absolutely. We looked at 38 million comments on The Guardian's website, The Guardian from the UK.
We had an instinct, based on reading a lot of academic literature, that it might be the case that people who responded quickly in the comment sections, both to the news article overall and to the other comments that were presented in response to the article, that those ones might contain more of the hateful stuff.
So we ran a big analysis of this, 38 million comments, including 1 million comments that The Guardian took away, the most hateful stuff, basically. What we found was, yes, statistically significantly, the comments that came earlier on, both in response to the news article overall and in response to other commenters, was more likely to be hateful, basically.
So quicker comments, greater increased risk of hateful content being there.
Did that surprise you that the first few comments that showed up were in fact the most angry, the most hateful?
I suppose not. So we have this hypothesis going in that it might be like this based on quite a diverse literature.
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Chapter 5: What time should you stop eating before bed for heart health?
There are some things in the psychology literature which would suggest that when we see red, we might need to curb our tongue or bite our tongue so that we don't come out with like... the worst stuff which might pop up to our mind when we're angry or when we meet a particularly disagreeable comment. So we have this hypothesis it might be like this.
And I mean, kind of in our common language, right, we talk about the fact that you should hold your breath, take a deep breath, count to 10, all these kind of things, which reflect that, you know, often when we face for something we disagree with strongly, what might happen if we respond quickly is perhaps not the most productive thing we could come out with.
Now, can the first comment being hateful, can that be sort of a tone setter for the entire conversation that goes on after that? Is that like me showing up to a dinner party, saying something hateful, angry, and then the whole night the conversation becomes that?
Somewhat, yeah. So this was another thing that we tested for in our analysis, and we found what was called an incivility contagion effect. So if one of the comment threads contains something hateful, it increases the chance that further comments will be hateful.
Chapter 6: What healthy habits can help manage stress according to Jess Cording?
And the more that that happens, the increased risk that more hateful comments will come in the same thread. And time is still a factor. So when that happens, increasingly so, the comments come quicker and quicker and quicker.
I'm kind of fascinated, but also kind of horrified by this idea that hate can travel faster than calm, reflective commenting. Is that a technology problem? Is that a psychology problem? Is that wrong with us? Like, is this human?
It is human, I think. So one thing that I should probably stress about the analysis is there were a lot of different commenters who were doing this, right?
Chapter 7: How is AI reshaping our relationship with money?
So there's a lot of people who are commenting quickly and coming out with pretty bad stuff, we have to assume. It's the stuff that The Guardian got rid of. And it wasn't just a few users. There were tens of thousands of users who were doing this. So we think it is a bit about the human psychology, right?
If we don't bite our tongue, if we don't take a moment to pause and reflect, it's likely that we'll come out with stuff which is less productive, including potentially hateful. I think it's also a technology problem, clearly. We have many, many communication technologies now, which increasingly it's about speed, it's about efficiency. I mean, in many respects, that's good.
It helps us to do a lot of things.
Chapter 8: What strategies can help manage turbulent moods?
It helps us to navigate the complex world that we live in in an effective way. But I think there are also some downsides of this. It means that we're we're not encouraged to bite our tongue or to take a moment to reflect and pause on what it is that we want to say or why we might find a comment disagreeable and we kind of just fall into loud screams and perhaps not the most productive thing.
So I think it's a little bit both of human psychology, but also how we design comment forums. This is definitely an aspect of the problem.
I don't consider the Guardian a particularly polarized media outlet, but there are many out there, especially here in North America. On those, the comments get even wilder, I find, especially when they're unmoderated. Is there a way we can use technology to get people to cool off? Like, I don't know. I've been on the platform Reddit, and it sometimes says, hey, you've commented too much.
You've got to wait 10 minutes. Or maybe like some sort of captcha image where the user has to prove they're not a robot, but that process might take 30 seconds. Side note, not having bots comment might also be a good thing. I'm not sure where that enters the conversation, but like what I'm asking, is there a cooling period we can enforce users to have? And if we do, they might be less hateful.
I mean, we could, yeah, definitely we could. So the thing you mentioned actually with captures is interesting. We've been experimenting with exactly that after this study where we found these results. So we've designed a couple of experiments with some of our students of finding ways to slow people down in comments forums.
We've just constructed our own and done these kind of small scale experimental studies. And we've used captures in one of them to try to slow people down for this kind of duration of, yeah, maybe 10, 20 seconds. kind of at the moment we're getting mixed results, right?
So it seems to get rid of the worst things, though it's difficult experimentally to induce hate for lots of reasons, including ethical ones. But in terms of improving the comment quality, we don't see that right now. I think the form is a big one, captures annoying people, and that sort of makes sense. What you mentioned with Reddit is interesting.
I know they do that, and I think that that points to the fact that we could have systems that slow people down and design digital spaces in that way. But the thing that rubs up against that slightly is for many of these big social media organizations or media organizations like the Guardian, they want engagement, right?
And if people are slowed down, there's a risk that they lose people to their sites. I think We have to think, what do we really want? And I would assume, like the conversation we're having now, and like you've expressed, there are a lot of people out there which would actually rather have a productive conversation and have moments for pause, right? That's a small cost to pay, maybe.
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