r/The_Donald helped radicalize users into far-right identities and discourse – Active users on r/The_Donald increasingly used white nationalist vocabularies in their comments within three months.

To all the people rushing to sarcastically comment how surprised they are: Yes, we all saw it happen. But..
It's important that studies are being conducted and the fact that the finding match our lived experience is still noteworthy.
This is why OP posted it. Science isn't feelings, you need data.
- Science is feelings
  Typo? 🤣
  
  Yes
  
  Seriously 😮‍💨 science is literally the opposite of something vague like "feelings"

Literally everyone on Reddit could see this except spez, who is a greedy little pigboy
- Oh he could see it too and didn't care because he's a self proclaimed libertarian.
  
  What's a right wing libertarian other than a fascist so selfish they aren't concerned or swayed by ideas of nationalism or "heritage". But they'll happily enable and march with the ones who are. When their self interest aligns. They just want to be the ones on top.
- Extremists are engagement.
  
  I really wonder if the nouveau rich tech startup boys look around and realize that their greed is directly responsible for the 2016 election and by extension, the state of US domestic politics today, and feel even a tiny bit of guilt over it.
  Probably not.

Remember when they lifted the no racism rule? I do.
- Yes. And I really should have left Reddit then and never looked back.
- It was a hilarious mask of movement. They did it to "own" /r/Sweden in the subwars and obviously got their asses handed to them.
- Reddit or the sub?
  
  The Donald.

While it certainly is a bit of a captain obvious moment that exposure to far-right echo chambers helped radicalise vulnerable people into the far-right, but I can see the merit in having empirical evidence supporting what we see (as OP said) - it is a lot easier to dismiss an andecdote than statistical evidence

To add on to the people pointing out that science is data:
Yes, it is incredibly obvious that the turmp fanclub subreddit would radicalize people to become white nationalists.
What is not obvious is that this is happening everywhere. And, if you get a hold of one of the "leaked" white supremacist recruiting guides from the 80s and 90s, that is by design.
South Park Libertarians and all but it really is telling how many people, to this day, insist that the f-slur for gay people is really "Oh, we took that back. it means obnoxious motorcycle drivers". Let alone statements like "har har, you are so butthurt" that (regardless of what urban dictionary says) are on the same level as "ha ha, you are gay"
We see it every day. And it makes communities hostile. And if you call it out, you get driven out. Which means there are fewer people around to say "... what the fuck? How can we think this is acceptable?". And then someone whose entire vocabulary is "lolzors go woke go broke pepe pepe" gets rightfully made fun of elsewhere and now they are a victim and all those "for the lolz" become their identity.
- Yes, it is incredibly obvious that the turmp fanclub subreddit would radicalize people to become white nationalists.
  They're polarizing and definitely hateful.
  But as the volume got cranked higher and higher, I think it encouraged more silent disgust than popular approval.
  You just couldn't see it under all the pro-Trump spam.
  And then someone whose entire vocabulary is “lolzors go woke go broke pepe pepe” gets rightfully made fun of elsewhere and now they are a victim and all those “for the lolz” become their identity.
  The online Shoot And Cry strategy. Always be the victim.
- the f-slur can't be reclaimed for me, personally, I'm happy for those who do reclaim it but its just too painful as it's what I got called when I was badly hurt and was worried I would die as a 12 year old.
  However, those who do reclaim it then use it around me, which just makes me think about what happened - involuntarily - and ruins my day (or part of it).
  It's also tricky being a bi man in a het relationship in this regard, as if someone knows that it's hard to overcome their feelings that due to my partners existence, I now no longer have a say in these matters.

insert shocked pikachu here I mean, is this really surprising? That place was a cesspool disguising as irony. But news flash, it stops being ironic after a certain amount of time.
- Who was that other dude? Think idubbz interviewed him.
  Was doing the same thing trying to hide behind layer of “meta irony” or whatever water muddying bullshit they wanted to call it.
  People who shoot crooked just don’t need to be trusted period
  
  Sam Hyde?
- It’s not about how expected this was. It’s about the fact that we have data to prove it, and it is definitely a probable phenomenon.
  Incidentally, I’d be fascinated to see the data the alphabet agencies have doubtlessly gathered on what major players on /r/TheDonald are affiliated with foreign agents (primarily Russia, though China and Israel absolutely had a hand in it too), or just straight up foreign agents themselves. I hear they’re going to release a big report about that on February 31st.
  
  Agreed, it's such a dereliction of duty to not report on this.
  As well as letting all the kompromized 4th of July legislators, et. al., and one former commander in chief in particular continue their treasonous subversion.
  We are heading right off the rails.
  
  We are heading right off the rails.
- disguising as irony.
  About this. It was legitimately funny at first, when the Orange One had no chance.
  The thing that turned it so fast from absolute satire into not at all satire was the immediate, within seconds, banning of anyone who called it out as a joke. The speed of those bans convinced me that someone was being paid to steer the narrative in their desired direction 24/7.
  It was a masterclass in modern propaganda, and I'm glad it's being studied.
  I learned personal lessons from it. I'm absolutely more PC now, because you never know who's going to take your absurd joke seriously. As Waddle said, if you say something ironically enough, it stops being ironic.
- a cesspool disguising as irony
  See also: various still-existing places such as PoliticalCompassMemes

This won't make Spez any more uncomfortable when he wants to sleep at night. According to him, that subreddit was "valuable discussion".

One cannot be an active thedonald user without already being a white nationalist.
Any dissent gets an instant permaban.
- Any dissent gets an instant permaban.
  So just like r/conservative? I only commented there once and was instantly permabanned. It was a while ago. Deinately before Trump was president, maybe 2015. Maybe earlier.
  I kinda watched the political climate change drastically since 2015. Statring form Trumps presidency to spreading all over America, Europe and the world. And I wonder where this came from in such masses. Russian efforts and paid propagandists? They can't be THAT powerful, can they? It is insane and it spreads everywhere. Into every corner of the world. I don't understand it. People seem to want authoritarian leadership. Have they all lost their minds?
  
  Not defending Russia, the us wrote the book on election interference. To act like it's not possible now is insane. American exceptionalism is the biggest hoax. The GOP is now banking on the us letting Putin win. They've sold us down the river with fanciful delusion that they will get to rule the ashes and install their Christo-fascist bullshit.

If you ever want to observe or engage (be ready for the pile-up) with these same folks, r/ShitPoliticsSays contains the exact same user-base of extremists. These are dyed-in-the-wool folks because they use this as a launching-point for brigading other subs comment threads. Lots of Canadian righties there, too. The only credit I'll give is unlike r/conservative that they never censored so you could pretty much discuss and test argumentative points to your heart's content.
Just read the thread covering this very article about T_D lol
Of course I still think a sizable chunk of these folks operate in discord channels and astroturfed Sanders subs (especially the 2020 election), ChapoTrapHouse, etc.

I don't know what they mean. I hung about in there for three years and I never picked up any white nationalist vocabulary.
This article sounds like (((globalist))) propaganda to me!
Edit: Incidentally, I was perma-banned from reddit for making a similar joke there.

My story from the donald is I got banned for saying, "Donald will have more than 2 terms." Or something like that.
Now Republicans don't think they should ever lose elections.

No. Fucking. Shit.
Any and I do mean, any conservative based subreddit all now function the same. r/conservatives have turned into a shithole. Hell, even TrueUnpopularOpinion has turned into it's own shithole because it's just a foundation for right-wingers to express their radicalized thought processes for all to see.
- ,
- Yeah, I've always described r/Conservative as The_Donald dressed up in their dad's suit and tie. But once The_Donald was finally banned (after they already left for their own website - thanks for nothing spez) r/Conservative dropped all pretenses.
  
  R/republican was a right wing echo bunker, too. I got banned for pointing out that the letter in the "article" that someone posted that claimed that the DOJ had found massive voter fraud in Georgia and asking the state to reject Biden's win was actually written by a Trumpist shill and contradicted the Republican AG, the DOJ, the Republican Governor, the Republican Secretary of State, and Republican election officials.
  I asked them a couple of times when major events in the prosecution of John Eastman occurred if they would reconsider. They blocked me for 30 days each time. When he was finally disbarred I asked again and they told me that if I didn't stop asking they would report me to the admins.
  Delicate little snowflakes in their echo bunker.
- r/unpopularopinion was a shithole. Any sub called "realXYZ" "QRS2" or "TrueABC" is just the "free speech" version started by someone pissed that they got banned for using slurs, so I'm not surprised r/TrueUnpopularOpinion went to shit. I'm surprised you think it was decent at any point tbh.
  
  There were a couple "trues" that actually had a purpose and were actively less shitty than the original one. The games and gaming subs were mostly memes and fan boys being assholes, but truegaming was for longer form discussion and memes weren't allowed.

Weak, all of them

Yes, that's why nazi digg kept them around.

It's all about living in a silo. Surround yourself with one side, and there's no other direction to go but further down your side.

I would be extremely interested if things changed after the sub went private.

,

Lmao the fascists are ready to burn down Reddit faster than greed would

And today the front page is still being used to push fanatical American extremism, just in a different guise. American progressives are just alternative Trumpists. It’s horrifying

4chan was pure weaponized autism in those days. They still call Trump "The meme president".
- weaponized autism?
  
  They've very much revealed that they come straight from 4chan.

i thought the donald got banned, guess there's a new the Donald.
- Please read the link! It's a study of that time on Reddit when the Donald was growing rapidly.
  
  read the link
  Blasphemy!
  
  thanks for the info, i will be potentially forgetting it .
- yeah, but i'm sure theres plenty of other subreddits doing the same shit. Reddit doesnt get rid of bad actors, it just redistributes them.

r/The_Donald helped ~~radicalize~~ extremify users into far-right identities and discourse – Active users on r/The_Donald increasingly used white nationalist vocabularies in their comments within three months.
FTFT. I so hate it when people who should know better ignore the actual meaning of terms.

I would've been curious to see what kinds of words got counted as "far-right vocabulary" but it appears that research has recently gone back to being effectively concealed behind paywalls for those of us not in academia.
- It's 2024, anyone feigning ignorance about what constitutes a "far-right vocabulary" is just being disingenuous.
  
  Oh, hey! Come on now!
  They could just be really, really stupid.
  
  One can assume, yes. But that's not especially scientific, is it? What's the point of the research if you can't look at the methodology?
  Someone else defended the post from people saying "well d'uh" by saying we need to corroborate our theories and not just assume they're correct. Kind of hard to do when research is hidden behind paywalls.
  
  That's not really true. Anyway, the "supplementary material" provides a few examples at least. We can only assume that they should be representative and that care was taken in drawing the boundary between that sort of thing and less objectionable but culturally adjacent terms.
  https://web.archive.org/web/20240511183257/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/1532673X241240429/suppl_file/sj-pdf-1-apr-10.1177_1532673X241240429.pdf
- Why are we downvoting this comment? It's a perfectly reasonable thing to wonder about the study, and I had the same thought.
  Not because I can't possibly imagine what could constitute "far right vocabulary..." But just cause I'm interested in the study methodology.
  Like yeah, any of us can often identify far-right language when we see it... But how did the researchers approach that systematically? Are there any surprises there, like phrases that I wouldn't recognize? Did they include patterns like "randomly capitalizing words for emphasis?" That would be interesting to know.
  Or maybe I misunderstood, and the people downvoting are just pro-paywall, idk.
  
  Some people seem to be more concerned with this study "feeling" correct more than it actually being verifiably correct.

So what's the definition of white nationalist vocabulary?
EDIT: Why da fuck am I getting down voted for wanting specifics on the very premise of the article?
- If you were familiar with far-right extremists before Reddit gave them a comfy little platform, it was painfully obvious.
  Sticking to vocabulary only, terms like "cuck" becoming their favourite insult was straight from neo-nazi circles, where it very deliberately meant "race traitor" -- someone who would let a black man fuck their wife.
  Since it had the most plausible deniability behind it, "cuck" survived about as long as "alt-right" did, before it became obvious to even the dullest of fucks that it was all just neo-nazis.
  But scattered around that, you had terms like "Zionists" and "ethnostate" that aren't inherently Nazi terms but are neo-nazis go-to problem and solution. You had outright dogwhistles like (((Soros))) and 1488. You had preferred slurs for women and minorities that came straight from places that were openly far-right, Holocaust advocates.
  You also had various versions of the same old Protocols/Mein Kamph conspiracy theories, custom built for internet reactionaries. Hell, the anti-Hillary frenzy escalated to accused the Democrats of blood libel for fucks sake -- one of the oldest antisemitic conspiracy theories there is.
  Most of these came and went as they carefully balanced remaining "mask on". If it became too much of a give away, it was retired and replaced. These days, they know to not even name their movement, because it makes it harder to attack. The "alt-right" is now just "Republicans" so they can hide their extremism behind moderates.
  Anyway, fuck the lot of them. Reddit providing a platform for groups like neo-nazis and anti-vaxxers has likely caused more social damage than anything on the internet to date.
  
  These days, they know to not even name their movement, because it makes it harder to attack.
  Sounds like they learned well from the progressive left :D
  There's no such thing as 'woke'!
  
  Wow that's a lot of text with a lot of opinion I don't really care for. I was more looking for a list but all I got was cuck, zionist, ethnostate, soros, and 1488. The rest is ideas and concepts and Dumas's conspiracy theories not vocaulary.
  Also imo its incredibly nieve to lump anyone who identifies with republican as an alt-right Nazi. That is literally the same generalisation group think blame game that Hitler used to blame and prosecute the Jews.
  I guess my only other question is why are the Palestinian protesters using at least 2 of these ideas/words?

- Even in a thread about nazis over on reddit, you punch left.
- Do you do anything other than punch left? Lol. Of course Lemmy is going to have Leftists, it was made by Marxist-Leninists along Communist principles. You are the one picking Lemmy over Reddit, here.
- Literally any thread on Lemmy
  .ee user shows up to whine about .ml
  .ee users proceed to tankie for israel all over the place

Did it actually radicalize, or just take the mask off? They may have used vocabularies they always wanted to.
Using an original dataset of Reddit user posting histories from 2015–2017, I test for increases in the frequency of this far-right vocabulary.
I think there's a lot to be discussed on the topic but I wouldn't put much on this methodology.
- ,
  
  Radicalization happens yes, it's a question of The Donald specifically doing it. It's not so big that many people will just randomly stumble into it like Fox (which is passive and 24/7). People have to kinda seek the sub out and engage. At that point they were probably quietly, let's just say, racist. So I put that in the category of mask off. I know people they could do that.
- Did it actually radicalize, or just take the mask off?
  When a community allows you to feel comfortable "taking the mask off" and embracing your inner bigot that is radicalization. So yes, The_Donald did radicalize people. Your comment is an attempt to highlight a distinction without a functional difference.
  
  I guess you could define radicalization like that, but I'd define it as taking regular Joe with no hate and you know radicalizing them.
  Radicalization (or radicalisation) is the process by which an individual or a group comes to adopt increasingly radical views in opposition to a political, social, or religious status quo.
  Yeah I think there's a difference between radicalization and mask off.
- Honestly, before now, this is what I had implicitly assumed was going on. I'm not American, and I had blocked most of this trash when it was happening, but my impression was that these ignorant people were just "coming out of the woodwork" so to speak.
  Of course, fear and hate are learned behaviors, but it's interesting to me to see that these people were actually being quantifiably radicalized by that website in particular, and they weren't simply bringing views to the platform that were being established elsewhere.
  
  People are emotional creatures. And in a place where a type of view is being actively promoted, it's very easy to align those emotions in that specific direction.
  An example here on Lemmy is ACAB. It's anti-police and it posts the bad stuff that's meant to show ACAB. They might say it shows the truth and people going through All, watching the videos and reading the articles might start thinking, huh cops seem bad. They keep going, read statistics and articles posted by other commenters and driven by this information, they eventually end up saying ACAB. Suddenly, anyone not saying ACAB is complicit, an enemy, a troll, part of the problem etc.
  It's the same for any politically charged social hub. It's not just people who had the views but lacked a place to vent them, but people who are ignorant on the subject and are radicalized through emotional outrage. Emotional opinions are the hardest to change because the investment in them is the greatest.