Hate-site thread metadata enables quantifying what content audiences reward

Evidence

Stormfront is ideal for the current research purposes for several reasons. First, its members pride themselves on their intellectualism, and they prohibit any discussion of violence on the website. Second, each discussion thread is presented as a separate entity, which can be read or responded to independent of other discussion threads. Additionally, each thread is listed under the subject header that was used by the person who initiated the thread. Finally, next to each subject header is a pair of numbers indicating how many people have viewed the message and how many have responded to it. Thus, it is possible to quantify the interest level generated by each topic, at the level of both viewing and responding. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 988

Categorization

• SHARE: Interesting methodological note: view/response counts on Stormfront threads let researchers measure which message types the in-group actually rewards — a neat natural experiment.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 988