[rrebelo]

> Watching distant cousins fight about politics

I've long been cautious to step into the WhatsApp hysteria going on here in Brazil. But the last (disgraceful) election here was the last straw. The level of stupidity in the memes from both sides was far beyond repulsive.

A solution that is working so far: automatic regulation. I created a Telegram group with a bot that censors the most common names and expressions on Brazilian partisan politics, using regular expressions. It is surprisingly effective, in a "no broken windows way": if you block the small infractions people don't come close to big infractions.

Breaking rules is a second national pastime in Brazil. Therefore, at the beginning people found it amusing to try to cheat the censoring regular expressions (e.g.: B0150N4R0, etc) After a while the trick only sharpened these expressions and now they just don't mention politics in the most partisan terms. We do see postings about issues (e.g.: education, fiscal crisis, etc) but not the stupid partisan dogfight. Politics is mostly a tribal thing, not an ideological one.

EDIT: I'd like to stress the "automatic" aspect of it. When you make the regulation/moderation algorithmic you gain 2 big psychological benefits:

* A fast feedback loop: because the post is immediately removed the association between cause and effect is much stronger. People understand much more that they are breaking a rule when the consequences of it are certain and immediate.

* Algorithmic solutions are "rules based" for most people that don't understand them. They perceive it as "the way things are" instead of an arbitrary decision by the person that wrote the algorithm.

[iagovar]

Hmmm, this is an interesting take. I may apply it to one of my communities. I've been playing with the idea of banning politics entirely, but that's what most people want to talk about.

Did you notice any improvement on the level of discussion? Or do they just reacted different with each other posts?

Also, do you just censor the keyword or remove the post entirely?

[rrebelo]

Beware: the devil is in the details. The trick is to choose the most provocative, trolling or insulting words. I let people discuss generic terms such as income distribution, fiscal crisis, education, etc. But I filter out terms such as "comunist", "fascist", "Bolsonaro" (the Brazilian version of Rodrigo Duterte) etc.

> Did you notice any improvement on the level of discussion?

So far, people are still on a "treading the waters"/"sensing the environment" period. But I sense that:

* The posts tangent to politics don't immediately trigger a knee jerk reaction. Surprisingly, when people discuss politics in a more abstract way, there is a lot more "I agree with you" between people that used to fight a lot. I count this as an improvement, although it is too early to see an increase of depth of understanding on the issues.

* In the beginning some people complained about my heavy-handed approach, calling it censorship and authoritarianism. I just didn't engage in their complaints. My standard response was "my house, my rules".

* There is a lot more of light-heart, especially among the younger ones. Childish jokes and memes are still around, but nothing offensive. In friends and family groups it is ok, these are habits I don't want to break.

> Also, do you just censor the keyword or remove the post entirely?

I remove the post and post a standard bot answer. Often, the bot gives some false positives, but people find it funny (e.g: "PT" is the acronym for both the main opposition political party and for "total loss" in Portuguese). Because I use regular expressions, people started a game of trying to outsmart the bot. Since it was for fun, it only helped sharpen up the expressions.

[spaniard89277]

Thank you, i may use your approach.

[Kye]

"Politics" is a shaky, fluid concept. For example: Talking about a date I went on would be political to a sizable subset of most communities because of the genders involved. Drawing the line there while others are able to speak about their lives freely would alienate a large part of your community.

Politics is not an innocent team sport with few/no consequences for the losing side. Figuring out where to draw the line requires a deep understanding of what is politicized and why.

[Joeri]

Politics by itself isn’t necessarily the problem, it’s the tribalism that brings out the worst. Politics is just one outlet that leads into tribalism, just like sports and religion.

[tivert]

> I created a Telegram group with a bot that censors the most common names and expressions on Brazilian partisan politics, using regular expressions.

How did you handle simple substitutions and noise like rethuglicans -> rethug1icans or rethuglicans -> re.thug.licans?

[rrebelo]

Regular expressions do cover most of the basic cases.

It will not handle some of them. But I discovered that partisan politics follow a Pareto rule, of sorts: 80% of the talk is around a small set of words. If you remove the adequate 80%, what remains is very ineffective, grotesque and pathetic communication. It is not enough to get people excited or willing to fight.

The tricky parts is to keep changing the set of words and regular expressions. Particularly on the months before an election the terms to filter go through intense change. After that they remain very stable.

Edit: I am trying now to use the Levenshtein distance[1] algorithm to preemptively detect the tricks you describe, of people deliberately changing some word in order to fool the regular expressions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance