Guide to Responsible, Strategic Reporting on Hate and Extremism

Recommendations for researchers, journalists and others on how to avoid unintentionally bolstering extremists and causing additional harm.

Want to Save the Comments From Trolls? Do It Yourself

A startup called Civil has a new plan to make comments more, well...

Pentagon secretly installs military influencers in civilian roles

Conservative veterans with large social media followings have been hired by the Defense Department and are amplifying Pete Hegseth’s culture-war fights.

Effective Altruism Is a Dangerous Cult — Here's Why

Understanding the "Scientology of Silicon Valley." (7,700 words)

Overperception of moral outrage in online social networks inflates beliefs about intergroup hostility

As individuals and political leaders increasingly interact in online social networks, it is important to understand the dynamics of emotion perception online. Here, we propose that social media users overperceive levels of moral outrage felt by individuals and groups, inflating beliefs about intergroup hostility. Using a Twitter field survey, we measured authors’ moral outrage in real time and compared authors’ reports to observers’ judgements of the authors’ moral outrage. We find that observers systematically overperceive moral outrage in authors, inferring more intense moral outrage experiences from messages than the authors of those messages actually reported. This effect was stronger in participants who spent more time on social media to learn about politics. Preregistered confirmatory behavioural experiments found that overperception of individuals’ moral outrage causes overperception of collective moral outrage and inflates beliefs about hostile communication norms, group affective polarization and ideological extremity. Together, these results highlight how individual-level overperceptions of online moral outrage produce collective overperceptions that have the potential to warp our social knowledge of moral and political attitudes.

Ingmar Rentzhog (@ingmar.wsocial.eu)

Criticism and scrutiny are welcome. But why so much hostility? Why assume the worst about our motives? I honestly don’t understand. If we share the goal of better social media, let’s talk about how to get there.

Folks in mentions call me a “fascism apologist” for not calling Scott a crypto-reactionary. He IS credulous about reactionary ideas & “insight”, part of their recruitment pipeline, and his community overlaps heavily with theirs. A fellow traveller. Bad & dangerous enoug

Folks in mentions call me a “fascism apologist” for not calling Scott a crypto-reactionary. He IS credulous about reactionary ideas & “insight”, part of their recruitment pipeline, and his community overlaps heavily with theirs. A fellow traveller.Bad & dangerous enough.19/— Jonathan Korman 🟣 (@miniver) February 18, 2021

Here are the internal Facebook posts of employees discussing today’s leaked memo

“I’ve always thought our ‘open but punitive’ stance was particularly vulnerable to suicide bombers.”

Morally Motivated Networked Harassment as Normative Reinforcement

While online harassment is recognized as a significant problem, most scholarship focuses on descriptions of harassment and its effects. We lack explanations of why people engage in online harassment beyond simple bias or dislike. This article puts forth an explanatory model where networked harassment on social media functions as a mechanism to enforce social order. Drawing from examples of networked harassment taken from qualitative interviews with people who have experienced harassment ( n = 28) and Trust & Safety workers at social platforms ( n = 9), the article builds on Brady, Crockett, and Bavel’s model of moral contagion to explore how moral outrage is used to justify networked harassment on social media. In morally motivated networked harassment, a member of a social network or online community accuses a target of violating their network’s norms, triggering moral outrage. Network members send harassing messages to the target, reinforcing their adherence to the norm and signaling network membership. Frequently, harassment results in the accused self-censoring and thus regulates speech on social media. Neither platforms nor legal regulations protect against this form of harassment. This model explains why people participate in networked harassment and suggests possible interventions to decrease its prevalence.

Effective Altruism Has a Hostile Culture for Women, Critics Say

Seven women connected to effective altruism tell TIME they experienced harassment and worse within the community

We Fought the Comment Spam (and the Comment Spam Didn't Win)

When we noticed that comment quality was rapidly declining on the blog, we decided to do something about it. And that something didn't involve closing comments, but improving them.

How the U.S. Military Learned to Embrace AI Warfare

A review of Katrina Manson, “Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare” (Norton, 2026).

Disinformation and grievance narratives

Disinformation is often defined as misleading content intended to instill false beliefs. But this definition is too narrow. We need to focus instead on its broader epistemic effects. Indeed, some disinformation campaigns rely not on sharing falsehoods but on spreading what I call grievance narratives. These narratives exploit the (real or imagined) grievances of a community and frame them as signs of a deeper systemic problem, typically instigated by a powerful and hostile group. In this way, they legitimize and amplify aversive emotions and foster a negative orientation toward the world, one in which emotions like resentment or indignation feel continuously warranted. Now, grievance narratives are particularly harmful because they epistemically isolate their targeted audience. In short, they undermine the network of information sources that a community can rely on and, as such, they obstruct access to epistemic goods, such as knowledge and understanding. This stems from a key feature of these narratives: namely, they polarize the world between those who recognize the forces responsible for the community’s suffering and those who don’t. The latter are portrayed as not merely mistaken, but as either hostile or complicit with those to blame. In this way, grievance narratives systematically foreclose any alternative explanation of the community’s experiences, leaving them with little more than a single narrative to trust.

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - Clay Shirky

Persistent patterns in long-lived online groups.

The social media discourse of engaged partisans is toxic even when politics are irrelevant

Abstract Prevailing theories of partisan incivility on social media suggest that it derives from disagreement about political issues or from status competition between groups. This study—which analyzes the commenting behavior of Reddit users across diverse cultural contexts (subreddits)—tests the alternative hypothesis that such incivility derives in large part from a selection effect: Toxic people are especially likely to opt into discourse in partisan contexts. First, we examined commenting behavior across over 9,000 unique cultural contexts (subreddits) and confirmed that discourse is indeed more toxic in partisan (e.g. r/progressive, r/conservatives) than in nonpartisan contexts (e.g. r/movies, r/programming). Next, we analyzed hundreds of millions of comments from over 6.3 million users and found robust evidence that: (i) the discourse of people whose behavior is especially toxic in partisan contexts is also especially toxic in nonpartisan contexts (i.e. people are not politics-only toxicity specialists); and (ii) when considering only nonpartisan contexts, the discourse of people who also comment in partisan contexts is more toxic than the discourse of people who do not. These effects were not driven by socialization processes whereby people overgeneralized toxic behavioral norms they had learned in partisan contexts. In contrast to speculation about the need for partisans to engage beyond their echo chambers, toxicity in nonpartisan contexts was higher among people who also comment in both left-wing and right-wing contexts (bilaterally engaged users) than among people who also comment in only left-wing or right-wing contexts (unilaterally engaged users). The discussion considers implications for democratic functioning and theories of polarization.