Political chat really has got dumber

• Autores: Douglas Heaven
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3154, 2017, pág. 10
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • In the US, critics have drawn attention to what they call the "Trump effect": a shift in norms since Donald Trump became a serious presidential candidate. Anecdotal reports say it has made racism and sexism more acceptable in public conversation. Now a study of online political discussion groups over the past 10 years shows that conversations have indeed become less sophisticated and more offensive. The team analyzed 3.5 billion comments from 25.3 million people between 2007 and 2017. They sorted the comments into two groups: one non-political, the other comprised of things posted to politics subreddits. Noting the frequency of offensive words and phrases gave a measure of how civil the discussions were. The non-political comments were fairly civil. The political comments were not. People were 35 per cent more likely on average to use offensive language in political than nonpolitical discussions. Political discourse was more offensive between May 2016 and May 2017 than in any other 12-month period in Reddit's history