{"id":22504,"date":"2016-11-21T15:42:12","date_gmt":"2016-11-21T23:42:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=22504"},"modified":"2016-11-21T15:42:12","modified_gmt":"2016-11-21T23:42:12","slug":"on-twitter-white-men-with-followers-can-change-racist-behavior","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=22504","title":{"rendered":"On Twitter, White Men With Followers Can Change Racist Behavior"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"trolls\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This researcher programmed bots to fight racism on Twitter. It worked. – The Washington Post<\/a><\/p>\n

The Post’s headline isn’t quite accurate. For one thing, they weren’t really “bots” (which to me suggests a program operating somewhat autonomously); they were puppet accounts, controlled directly by the researcher, Kevin Munger. From the study’s abstract<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I employ an intervention designed to reduce the use of anti-black racist slurs by white men on Twitter. I collect a sample of Twitter users who have harassed other users and use accounts I control (\u201cbots\u201d) to sanction the harassers. By varying the identity of the bots between in-group (white man) and out-group (black man) and by varying the number of Twitter followers each bot has, I find that subjects who were sanctioned by a high-follower white male significantly reduced their use of a racist slur. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The “sanction” was a tweet saying “Hey man, just remember there are real people who are hurt when you harass them with that kind of language”. Using this tweet, the high-follower white male puppets – and only <\/em>those puppets – could improve behavior. Tellingly, the same tween from low-follower black male puppets led to increased <\/em>use of racial slurs.<\/p>\n

Surprisingly, anonymous twitter users were the ones whose behavior improved. Non-anonymous users did not reduce their slur usage in response to being criticized. (I would have guessed the opposite.)<\/p>\n

It’s a shame that he didn’t use actual bots, since that would be very useful if it worked. However, a bot might have a hard time distinguishing harassing tweets from other tweets (such as a person complaining about having been called a slur).<\/p>\n

I guess for the sake of reducing variables, he didn’t test responses to female identities. I hope someone does in a follow up study. It wouldn’t surprise me if female identities, like black identities, were less effective at changing behavior, but I’d be interested to see the numbers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This researcher programmed bots to fight racism on Twitter. It worked. – The Washington Post The Post’s headline isn’t quite accurate. For one thing, they weren’t really “bots” (which to me suggests a program operating somewhat autonomously); they were puppet … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,93,185],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language-politics","category-race-racism-and-related-issues","category-racism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22504"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22506,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22504\/revisions\/22506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}