Sign up to receive free updates on Digital Media news. You’ll get a daily email from myFT digesting the latest information. Today, we have an interesting story that sheds light on the downside of the US media’s obsession with culture wars. It appears that a group of economists who thought they were commenting anonymously online were not as anonymous as they believed.
Florian Ederer, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Kyle Jensen presented their findings at the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Summer Institute. While their presentation primarily explores how individuals behave when they are anonymous, there isn’t much groundbreaking or intriguing information in that regard. The conclusion is rather predictable: people often behave poorly.
However, the researchers did stumble upon something fascinating. They employed a readily available language model to identify “toxic speech.” Ederer mentioned that he thought the model’s criteria for toxicity were quite strict. Yet, it wasn’t this aspect that caught our attention.
The real revelations came when the researchers discovered a method for uncovering the IP addresses of commenters using only public data. It turns out that the posts are assigned specific usernames based on an encrypted combination of the topic ID and the user’s IP address. Unfortunately, this combination was not protected with salt, which spells trouble for the most active commenters on the EJMR forum.
Interestingly, the analysis reveals that commenters from Harvard University IPs tend to discuss Harvard more than any other topic, except maybe MIT. The University of Chicago, on the other hand, has commenters with a semblance of self-respect.
What’s even more noteworthy is that these commenters come from a mix of top economics departments, non-top-25 economics departments, and even the Federal Reserve Board. Some combinations of commenters and topics caught our attention, such as those mentioned above.
While these slides were not included in the official presentation on the NBER’s website, they were leaked on social media, prompting us to share them. However, it’s worth noting that the IP address mentioned in the leaked slides is over 12 years old and no longer relevant. Nonetheless, it provides an amusing touch to the story.
Regrettably, the researchers were not inspired by the infamous $1 million dare when conducting their presentation. For a more comprehensive understanding, you can refer to the official version of their presentation.
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