Race- Privilege, Relations, Racism, etc.

Example of message designed to remind harassers of the humanity of their victims and to reconsider the norms of online behavior. (Screen shot from Twitter by Kevin Munger/TMC)

Despite rising concern among the public, social-media companies have had little success stemming the wave of online harassment. As part of research recently published in the journal Political Behavior, I conducted an experiment on Twitter to find out the best tactics people can use to discourage other users from using harassing language. I found that these sanctioning messages do have an effect, but not in all contexts.

Twitter is certainly aware of this problem. As CEO Dick Costelo said in an internal memo in 2015, “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years.” They do suspend some of the more egregiously abusive accounts, and they have started implementing more sophisticated techniques like “shadow banning.”

However, there may be limits to the effectiveness of top-down efforts by companies that run social-media platforms. In the short run, heavy-handed sanctions like account bans can actually embolden users who are censored. There is excellent evidence that this happens in China when the regime employs censorship.

A better option might be to empower users to improve their online communities through peer-to-peer sanctioning. To test this hypothesis, I used Twitter accounts I controlled (“bots,” although they aren’t acting autonomously) to send messages designed to remind harassers of the humanity of their victims and to reconsider the norms of online behavior.

The use of an experiment allowed me to tightly control the context for sanctioning. I sent every harasser the same message:

@[subject] Hey man, just remember that there are real people who are hurt when you harass them with that kind of language

I used a racial slur as the search term because I thought of it as the strongest evidence that a tweet might contain racist harassment. I restricted the sample to users who had a history of using offensive language, and I only included subjects who appeared to be a white man or who were anonymous.

It was essential to keep the race and gender of the subjects constant to test my central question: How would reactions to my sanctioning message change based on the race of the bot sending the message?

To do so, I created two types of bots: white men and black men. To manipulate the race, I used the same cartoon avatar for the bots’ profile picture and simply changed the skin color. Using a method that has been frequently employed to measure discrimination in hiring, I also gave the bots characteristically white or characteristically black first and last names.

Here’s an example of “Greg,” a white bot:

“Greg”, the white bot used in the author’s study. (Screen shot from Twitter by Kevin Munger/TMC)

The picture at the start of this post is a screenshot of “Rasheed,” a black bot, in action.

To make the bots look more like real people, I followed some celebrities/news outlets and sent a number of harmless tweets (“Strawberry season is in full swing, and I’m loving it”).

I also varied the number of followers the bots had, to test the theory that “higher status” people are more effective at changing others’ behavior. To do this, I bought followers for half of the bots — 500 followers, to be specific — and gave the remaining bots only two followers each (see screenshot above). This represents a large status difference: a Twitter user with two followers is unlikely to be taken seriously, while 500 followers is a substantial number.

Overall, I had four types of bots: High Follower/White; Low Follower/White; High Follower/Black; and Low Follower/Black. My prediction was that messages from the different types of bots would function differently. I thought High Follower/White bots would have the largest effect, while Low Follower/Black bots would have only a minimal effect.

I expected the white bots to be more effective than the black bots because all of my subjects were themselves white, and there is evidence that messages about social norms from the “in-group” are more effective than messages from the “out-group.” Race does not always define in-group/out-group status, but because these subjects were engaged in racist harassment, I thought that this was the most relevant group identity.

The primary behavior I hoped to change with my intervention was the subjects’ use of racist slurs. I tracked each subject’s Twitter use for two months and calculated the change in the use of a particular racial slur.

Only one of the four types of bots caused a significant reduction in the subjects’ rate of tweeting slurs: the white bots with 500 followers. The graph below shows that this type of bot caused each subject to tweet the slur 0.3 fewer times per day in the week after being sanctioned◊.

Change in average daily slur use in the week following online sanctioning (Data and Figure: Kevin Munger) Change in average daily slur use in the week following online sanctioning (Data and Figure: Kevin Munger) Roughly 35 percent of subjects provided some personal information on their profile. The effects of my messages on this subset — that is, non anonymous Twitter users — were strikingly different. Tweets from white bots with 500 followers did not cause a significant change in these users’ behavior, but tweets from black bots with few followers (the type of bots that I thought would have a minimal effect) actually caused an increase in the use of racist slurs.

The messages were identical, but the results varied dramatically based on the racial identity and status of the bot and the degree of anonymity of the subject.

Overall, I found that it is possible to cause people to use less harassing language. This change seems to be most likely when both individuals share a social identity. Unsurprisingly, high status people are also more likely to cause a change.

Many people are already engaged in sanctioning bad behavior online, but they sometimes do so in a way that can backfire. If people call out bad behavior in a way that emphasizes the social distance between themselves and the person they’re calling out, my research suggests that the sanctioning is less likely to be effective.

Physical distance, anonymity and partisan bubbles online can lead to extremely nasty behavior, but if we remember that there’s a real person behind every online encounter and emphasize what we have in common rather than what divides us, we might be able to make the Internet a better place.

Kevin Munger is a Graduate Research Associate of the NYU Social Media and Political Participation (S Ma PP) lab and Ph D candidate in the Department of Politics at New York University.

The Good Immigrant includes contributions from 21 black, Asian and minority ethnic authors including actor Riz Ahmed and comedian Nish Kumar.

It was named winner of the Readers Choice Award at the inaugural Books Are My Bag Readers Awards, which received votes from more than 50,000 people.

The book was partially crowdfunded, with author JK Rowling donating £5,000.

Author Nikesh Shukla, who edited the collection, said it was "amazing" to win an award decided by readers.

Guys, do you seriously think that Trump is going to pardon a guy who (barring some undetected mental illness or a particularly stupid Law & Order plotline) is unambiguously guilty of mass murder?

The Economist: America’s alt-right learns to speak Nazi: “Lügenpresse”

GERMANS are usually proud of their exports, including their words. What better term than Fahrvergnügen (“driving pleasure”) to sell cars? They are less pleased when foreigners import words that hark back to Germany’s darkest chapter. It was therefore horrifying to see white nationalists at a rally in Washington, shortly after Donald Trump’s victory, saluting with outstretched arms and shouting “Hail victory!”—a conscious echo of the Nazi greeting, Sieg Heil! It has also been disconcerting to hear Mr Trump’s supporters adopt the term Lügenpresse to refer to the mainstream media, or to any journalists who criticise the president-elect. For in America as in Germany, the term, which means “lying press”, is used not only as a cudgel against allegedly out-of-touch media elites but also to validate whatever conspiracy theory the shouter espouses.

Lügenpresse has a long and ugly history in Germany. It was first used after the failed revolutions of 1848, mainly in Catholic polemics against the liberal press. From the start it implied that the media were controlled by Freemasons or Jews. After the Franco-Prussian war, the term was directed at the French press for its alleged lies. During the first world war, after Germany got a thrashing in foreign newspapers for what they called the “rape of Belgium”, Allied (and especially British) newspapers earned the moniker. That set a usage pattern that holds till today: Lügenpresse refers to any medium that does not reflect the user’s own worldview, and must therefore be propagated by a hated “Other”.

In the interwar years the term was used both by communists against the “bourgeois Lügenpresse” and by the Nazis against—no surprise—the allegedly Jewish and Bolshevik media. Once the Nazis seized power and took control of the domestic press, they naturally stopped calling it a Lügenpresse. Instead Hitler and Goebbels once again applied it to the foreign press—for instance, for reporting the 1938 Kristallnacht.

After 1945 West Germans wisely shunned the word. The East Germans were less inhibited: it was now the West German media that became the capitalist and fascist Lügenpresse. In the reunited Germany the term made a comeback among neo-Nazi and right-wing groups. Since 2014 it has been a favourite chant at demonstrations by PEGIDA, a xenophobic movement that is centred on the eastern city of Dresden. Some mobs have become physically aggressive against journalists—39 such attacks were counted last year.

In 2014 a jury that chooses the worst German word of the year picked Lügenpresse, calling it “especially perfidious”. And yet a poll in 2015 found that 39% of Germans, and 44% of eastern Germans, found the word at least partly appropriate. This is dispiriting to critics of the Western media who do not ascribe its failings to malign conspiracies. Lügenpresse is one German export that the world would be better off without.

So Dylann Roof apparently got to help pick the jury as well.

The good: The judge can overrule him.

The bad: Why.

The video in the North Charleston, South Carolina, police shooting of Walter Scott couldn’t be any clearer: Scott posed no threat to police officer Michael Slager when Slager shot at least eight times at Scott’s back. Scott was fleeing, but the 50-year-old was barely running — he was moving so slowly that Slager could have caught up to him with a brisk walk. And the encounter began after Scott ran from a traffic stop over a broken brake light — hardly a matter of grave public concern.

And yet.

On Monday, a jury concluded that it will not be able to reach a verdict in Slager’s trial, leading a judge to declare a mistrial in the case. The police officer who shot and killed Scott now looks a little more likely to go free if the local prosecutor decides not to retry the case.

There have been ambiguous police killing cases in the past. We didn’t have video for the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The video of the police shooting of Tamir Rice in Cleveland was a bit blurry, but it showed that Rice really did have a toy gun that officers could have mistaken for a real firearm. Other police killing cases had similar ambiguities.

But we had a clear video, from a bystander, of Scott’s death in April 2015. Scott was shot in the back, haphazardly fleeing from a confrontation that began over a broken brake light. What’s more, the video disproved parts of Slager’s story: Slager claimed that Scott tried to grab his stun gun before he opened fire. But the video shows Scott with his back against the officer when he’s shot. And it shows Slager walking over and seemingly planting the stun gun by Scott’s body, presumably to give his side credibility.

The video was so damning that it flipped major pundits who normally side with police in these cases. Conservative Fox News host Sean Hannity said on his show that “you do not shoot an innocent man in the back eight times in cold blood like this. … If he’s not a threat to the officer, or threat to anybody else, there is never a justification in terms of tactics and techniques and training. There’s no justification for what I see on that video. None.” Conservative National Review writer Charles C.W. Cooke echoed a similar view.

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“There is a tendency to believe an officer over a civilian, in terms of credibility,” David Rudovsky, a civil rights lawyer who co-wrote Prosecuting Misconduct: Law and Litigation, told Amanda Taub for Vox. “And when an officer is on trial, reasonable doubt has a lot of bite. A prosecutor needs a very strong case before a jury will say that somebody who we generally trust to protect us has so seriously crossed the line as to be subject to a conviction.”

The Slager trial played into this: Slager testified that he felt Scott posed a threat at the time of the shooting, putting his word against the obvious takeaway from the video. And if Slager persuaded just one person to doubt the case against him, that’s enough — since a jury conviction requires a unanimous jury. That seems to be what happened. (Notably, 11 of 12 jurors were white, even though Charleston County is 28 percent black.)

The judge declared a mistrial after getting the jury’s non-decision. The case could be retried, but it’s possible the prosecutor will decide not to.

But this is the typical outcome of police shooting cases: If police are charged, they’re very rarely convicted. The National Police Misconduct Reporting Project analyzed 3,238 criminal cases against police officers from April 2009 through December 2010. They found that only 33 percent were convicted, and only 36 percent of officers who were convicted ended up serving prison sentences. Both of those are about half the rate at which members of the public are convicted or incarcerated.

But the Scott shooting was supposed to be different. The national mood around police shootings has changed due to the Black Lives Matters protests. And this time there’s a clear video of what happened, showing that Scott was clearly not a threat to anyone, much less Slager, at the time he was shot or even if he had fled. And yet a man is dead, and the jury couldn’t convict the person who killed him.