Politically-engaged Redditors tend to be more toxic -- even in non-political subreddits

Political topics are also the topics that are most strongly gamed by political actors using Persona Management software to make it seem like their opinion is in the majority. The idea that people who participate in things such as "forum sliding" aren't toxic in their interactions is absurd, so we're left with assuming a large number of these toxic accounts aren't actually real people.

I'm not saying people deep into politics can't be toxic. Plenty of them are, sure. However, it's in the interest of people with political power (especially politicians with politically unpopular ideas) to make regular people not want to participate in politics. One way you do that is to make all political people seem unhinged, angry, and just terrible. People wonder why hardly anyone votes in elections, this kind of stuff is why, and it's not on accident that these folks seem like the majority.

I'm fully convinced the majority of them are bots trying to make politics in general seem more toxic than it actually is to dissuade more people from even wanting to be involved. The intent is to drive political apathy.

Sources:

US government developing Persona Management software in 2011: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks

Eglin Air Force Base is most "Reddit Addicted City" in 2014: https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.html

One of many research papers on Persona Management and Influencing Social Networks from Eglin AFB: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf

Helpful Reading Materials:

The Gentleperson's Guide To Forum Spies: https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm

I'd imagine the same is true for Lemmy and politically engaged people (at least online) overall.

Doing my best to change this. I am extremely toxic without engaging in political behavior.

This sounds like the textbook definition of a collider. Meaning that being toxic is the likely “root cause” and that toxic people are more likely to engage in political discourse (because it’s likely going to be toxic anyways? Idk) and they are more likely to comment toxic stuff in general.

In a turn of events that comes as a surprise to precisely zero Reddit users...

I'm political as fuck.¹ While I try not to be toxic, I will sometimes call out aberrant opinions or counterfactual assumptions when I see them and that can lead to toxic exchanges.

So, yeah, I think the virtue of having strong opinions about things controversial is going to inspire heated exchanges more frequently.

¹ Sex in the US is very political right now.

Politics leads to stress, stress leads to anger, anger leads to people saying "KYS, fascists, or I'll do it for you."

I like to argue with people about politics. The internet is the safest place to do so.

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.

I think it's the other way round – expressive people are more likely to have strong political opinions

they needed a study for that?

No shit?

If you are discussing the exploitation of labor and people are bitching and moaning that "lazy devs" are taking too long to release a patch, you aren't going to grin and say how awesome of a burn that was on those losers who just got purged in a layoff. Because social and political issues permeate everything we do. Hell, we have people who are insisting that one of the biggest social media platforms on the planet re-platforming alex jones is "not tech news".

Which gets to the other aspect. Reddit, and Lemmy, has a tendency to never consider the source of a problem. Going back to the lazy devs example: Most moderators have zero issue with "This is trivial to implement and they are wasting their time making trailers or adding new skins". It doesn't violate any rules (and, even if it does, you can't gather that from just the single comment). But when someone points out how toxic that narrative is? Suddenly this becomes a flame war (because nobody can accept they might not be perfect) and the entire branch gets nuked... except that initial lazy devs commentary is still there.

Sometimes that is intentional by the moderators (the lemmy.world 3d printing board has some good examples of that...). Mostly it is just because... being a moderator sucks and it is rare that a burst of traffic doesn't involve a disproportionate burst of flaming and trolling. So suddenly they are inundated with angry people from all around whereas last week they had just a few porn posts a day.

But pretty much all of this is an extension of "tone policing". Someone saying the world would be a better place if you and everyone like you were executed or enslaved? Better be careful how you respond. If you don't smile enough, then YOU are the problem. So lighten up and learn that both sides have a point and maybe you should be the bigger person and only breathe 20% of the day instead of 90%.

In other news, water is wet.

I think most people have a friend or relative like this. They simply must bring their political views into every single conversation, all of the time. If you try to deflect or even outright tell them you don't want to discuss politics, they will invariably say something like "but everything is political". It's exhausting. Then they wonder why they stop getting invited to things.

This just in, the sky is blue and the Pope is Catholic.

None of us are unguilty, not one

toxic people are toxic

I unfollowed all the political subreddits I used to follow except stupidpol and red scare for exactly this reason.

Some people just want to grill