Toxic Econ

A paper was recently presented at a conference of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a private research institution in Cambridge, Massachusetts, dealing with a website called Economics Job Market Rumors (EJMR).* Anyone can post there anonymously. Although the postings do deal with economics-related topics, and although the website posts a long list of good behavior rules (perhaps to reassure advertisers), the fact that the postings are anonymous allows "toxic" comments featuring racism, misogyny, etc.

Three economists reported a technique for identifying IP addresses from which particular comments come at the conference, i.e., they report that while using public data from the website - sifting through a vast data set - they can identify particular computers (each computer has a unique IP address) from which particular comments come. Computers, of course, are not the same as individuals; individuals may use more than one computer and more than one person may use a particular computer. And there are other caveats regarding the statistical techniques used. Nonetheless, the paper suggests that there are many toxic comments coming from top university economics departments. As the buzz around the paper spread, the outside world became interested. A reporter from the New York Times attended the presentation.**

When advanced copies of the paper began to circulate, users of EJMR began to speculate as to whether they would be "doxxed" (exposed as individuals). In fact, the paper does not purport to identify individuals. There was also grumbling about whether what the authors did was somehow illegal, improper, a violation of "free speech," etc. And toxic comments were made about at least one of the paper's authors, as shown below:

Note that the Wallis Theater in Beverly Hills would probably not want its ad running on this site if it knew about the toxicity. But, as noted above, the ostensible statement about bad behavior on the site may suggest to advertisers that their content is protected.

Inside Higher Ed ran a lengthy story on the paper yesterday: [Excerpt]

Researchers looking into online toxicity found a way to connect supposedly anonymous posts on the site Economics Job Market Rumors (EJMR) to IP addresses over the past dozen years, according to a draft paper leaked early online.

While EJMR is an academic jobs forum, it “also includes much content that is abusive, defamatory, racist, misogynistic or otherwise ‘toxic,’” the paper says.

“EJMR is sometimes dismissed as not being representative of the economics profession, including claims that the most frequent users on the platform are not actually economists,” the paper says. “However, our analysis reveals that the users who post on EJMR are predominantly economists, including those working in the upper echelons of academia, government and the private sector. In this paper, we identify the scheme used to assign usernames for each post written by an anonymous user on EJMR. We show how the statistical properties of that algorithm do not anonymize posts, but instead allows the IP address from which each post was made to be determined with high probability.” ...

[EJMR] sent this email [to Inside Higher Ed]: "It is essential to maintain an anonymous forum in the economics profession. EJMR has been used to expose multiple counts of plagiarism, corruption and serious professional misconduct that would not likely have been shared for fear of retaliation by their higher ups or colleagues. Indeed one of the co-authors of the paper had their own likely plagiarism exposed by anonymous EJMR users, calling into question the motivation for the study.  This paper’s attempt to expose the identities of the vast majority of good natured users, using the excuse of there being a very small number of toxic posts on the site, is something that many people find troubling, deeply unethical, and may well be illegal." ...

The draft paper does include a chart showing, for each of the top 25 U.S. News–ranked economics departments, the percentage of total posts labeled toxic. The University of California, Los Angeles, at nearly 15 percent toxic, ranked No. 1, followed by Yale and the University of California, San Diego, both above 10 percent...

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/diversity-equity/2023/07/20/study-says-it-found-ip-addresses-anonymous-ejmr.

The article included a link to the paper at:

https://www.insidehighered.com/sites/default/files/2023-07/ejmr_paper_nber(1).pdf.

The chart referred to above is below:

Below is the abstract of the paper:

Anonymity and Identity Online
Florian Ederer (Boston U), Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham (Yale School of Management), and Kyle Jensen (Yale School of Management)

July 17, 2023

Abstract: Economics Job Market Rumors (EJMR) is an online forum and clearinghouse for information about the academic job market for economists. It also includes much content that is abusive, defamatory, racist, misogynistic, or otherwise “toxic.” Almost all of this content is created anonymously by contributors who receive a four-character username when posting on EJMR. Using only publicly available data we show that the statistical properties of the scheme by which these usernames were generated allows the IP addresses from which most posts were made to be determined with high probability. We recover 47,630 distinct IP addresses of EJMR posters and match these to 66.1% of the roughly 7 million posts made over the past 12 years. We geolocate posts and describe aggregated cross-sectional variation—particularly regarding toxic speech—across sub-forums, geographies, institutions, and contributors.

The conference presentation of the paper on EJMR can be seen at:

Or direct to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFCApVPawI4&t=27345s. This link is set to start at time 7:36:16. If you get lost, start at that time.

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*https://www.econjobrumors.com/.

**I did not find anything in the NY Times as of this morning about the paper.