Hopefully, in just a few years this could salvage social media from becoming a
flame-war. Companies like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube (just to name a few) seem to be caught in a horrible ideological loop: fight "free speech" by trying to weed out trolls, or allow them to run rampant and ruin any and all conversations.
AI Can Now Predict Internet Comment Fights
The responses of one
flame-war participant showed that "the curious blend of sincerity and sport found in animated rhetoric, the vigorous conviction that one perspective can in fact outperform another (and ought to be allowed to, on the grounds of ongoing social and verbal drama, not merely arbitrary privilege) does occasionally yield results" - that is, end in persuasion (p.
Internet Culture
He would like us to believe that in cyberspace "the despatialization of interaction" means that "there is no such thing as a better address." But as anyone who has spent any time in the
flame-war free-for-alls of Internet-based discussion groups soon learns, you are who your e-mail address is.
City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn