Podcast · Viikon viisasteluklubi Viisastelu 15.12.2022 · 2022-12-15 · 40:38 · In Finnish

A study with no control group — Sami Miettinen on Weekly Wiseguys

Published as “Viisastelu: Tutkija löysi Twitteristä vihaista puhetta – sananvapauden vihollisten propaganda jyllää”

Hosted by: Ivan Puopolo

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Sami Miettinen joined Viikon viisastelu — Ivan Puopolo’s weekly political panel, known in English here as Weekly Wiseguys — on 15 December 2022, with Tere Sammallahti. At 40 minutes it is the shortest episode in this run, and it is almost entirely about one study.

A justice-ministry commission had examined hate speech directed at government ministers: some 10,000 tweets over three months, hand-coded by a single researcher, with accusations of corruption, of lying and of treason all counted as hate speech. The panel’s criticism is methodological and it holds up. There was no control group, so nothing in the data can show whether the volume is unusual — no one knows how much comparable material was aimed at the opposition leader. Follower counts were reported in absolute terms with no denominator, which makes “a large share of hostile accounts follow X” uninterpretable without knowing X’s total following and what share of ordinary users follow the same accounts. And once accusing a minister of corruption counts as hate speech, the result follows from the definition rather than from the evidence.

The strongest single observation is not about the study at all. The government programme proposed criminalising “targeting”; the doctor of laws appointed to examine it concluded that no separate criminal provision was needed, because existing rules sufficed. The project went ahead regardless.

The panel also turns on itself in four places worth noting: nobody disputes that ministers receive vile messages, and one speaker says his own reaction to abuse aimed at him is pity rather than outrage, in every direction; extensive block lists produce bubbles whichever side builds them; a right-wing government’s supporters behaving the same way would deserve the same criticism; and the conflation of humanitarian with work-based immigration, which they spend the last section attacking, is something they say business-lobby figures on their own side do as well.

Chapters

• 00:00 — The free-speech corner: a new study on hate speech aimed at ministers
• 00:49 — The data: 10,000 tweets, hand-coded
• 01:37 — What was classified as hate speech
• 02:26 — Why the concept keeps expanding
• 03:12 — A policy recommendation drawn from the study
• 03:59 — The missing control group
• 04:46 — Absolute follower counts with no denominator
• 05:32 — What the study actually established
• 06:21 — Invented tweets, and the limits of the coding
• 08:04 — When criticism is answered with labels
• 08:51 — Commissioned research, and criminalising “targeting”
• 09:20 — The government’s own expert reached the opposite conclusion
• 09:47 — Hate speech versus hostile messaging
• 11:12 — Two commissioned studies in the same year
• 12:53 — A quotation about silencing
• 13:41 — Free speech as an article of the declaration
• 14:34 — Musk, block lists, and a reporting mechanism disappearing
• 15:22 — The bubble that hides the trends
• 17:03 — The political fight over definitions
• 17:53 — “The right side of history”, and why that is not democratic
• 18:40 — The same logic from the right: what if criticising tax were criminalised
• 20:16 — What stays outside the bubble: the need to adjust
• 21:07 — What an AI answered to the same question
• 22:46 — Why the follow-up question was not asked
• 24:22 — A prediction against their own side
• 25:13 — The European Parliament corruption case, and the first reaction
• 27:35 — An editorial on gang crime
• 28:28 — News selection: what does not get reported
• 31:03 — An argument that does not hold: does debate drive talent away
• 33:34 — The immigration service, two lanes, and a proposal to split it
• 36:00 — Conflating the categories — on their own side too

The recording lives on Ivan Puopolo’s own channel and he owns it. This page is a record of the appearance and a pointer to the original, not a copy of it. The chapter marks above are derived from the recording itself; the episode carries no published chapter list of its own.

A fuller write-up is on Neuvottelija AI, in English and in Finnish.

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