How is the best way to handle trolls? It’s hard to identify them based on single posts, so the reporting function seems limited. Should we contact a mod and say “I think _____ is a troll”? Something else? And is it true that if enough people mute a poster, they’ll be identified as a potential troll?
Continuing the discussion from Improved Covid vaccine poll:
Leads to bullying and majority rule imo. Not the healthiest approach.
They did say ‘possible troll.’ I would generally agree that we don’t want to ban anyone just because some number of users ignore/mute them.
Non-Trolls can occasionally troll and Trolls can occasionally have non-trolling conversations
Someone disagreeing with you is not trolling, even if they persist in continuing the conversation
Best way to handle is stop participating in the conversation. If the person comes after you in multiple threads, than it is a cause to report
The best way to handle trolls, depending on your preferences, is to either ignore them or report them as possible trolls.
It’s true that the system alerts the mods if five posters are ignoring the same person. But, in my experience (and I’ve been moderating another Discourse forum for a while now) posters who get ignored a lot usually aren’t trolls. Often, they are people with a minority view on some subject and an abrasive style. Sometimes they are posters who are unusually chatty. Sometimes they are rude and abusive posters – which is valuable for the mods, even though they aren’t trolls.
But i don’t think I’ve ever seen the mods recognize a troll based on posters ignoring someone. You should ignore posters based on your own preferences, not as a way to send a message to the mods.
If you think someone is trolling, report it. For that matter, if you think someone is rude and abusive, or otherwise violating community standards, please report them, and explain why. If you think there’s a pattern, it’s helpful to report a couple of posts and explain your reasoning.
I do believe that when you flag a post, there’s an option for “Something Else” in which you can articulate your concerns. This sets up a discussion thread with the moderators.
The details!!!
I’m doing my part, but others are not, leading to pages of trolling junking up the board.
Will do. Thanks!
Another option, if someone isn’t trolling, but some hijack is taking over the thread, is to report THAT. Mods can move blocks of posts or request that posters drop a topic within a thread.
I wonder if ignoring a poster will also hide threads started by that poster . . .
Nope.
Thanks.
I don’t think it’s trolling as much as starting inane threads as if there’s some real controversy, though there’s a hell of a lot of non-responsiveness to actually taking a position on anything. I don’t consider that trolling, I consider it just more … well, there’s probably a censorable word that applies but doesn’t exist. Or, I can’t come up with it at the moment.
Much of it is manufactured bullshit which, yes I think there was some of that at the AO, but right now it’s like an attempt to replicate something I’d expect at realmagapatriotsstandingupforfreedom.com.net.ru or so, but in a professional, tasteful manner.
I do wish the ignore function worked better such that if someone on ignore starts a thread, the system automatically applies the ignore to those threads. As it is, I have to go in and mute each one that appears.
I think sometimes people are uncomfortable with walking away, thinking it gives some illusion of credibility of the troll.
Just think what a dozen new threads with 0 responses would do.
I think the word you’re looking for is “trolling.” LOL. I think many people think that a troll needs to be abusive to be a troll, but that’s not true. Smart trolls are usually not abusive because then they fly under the radar for a longer period of time.
Yeah, I can see that. The troll is seeking the reaction though, so you’re playing right into their hands.
I was probably thinking more like vacillating prick but whatever works.
Bump for some recent activity.
Checks out
Seems we got a new/old live one, from long ago on the AO. We can always hope that no one responds, but the OCD’s here just won’t let that happen.
By Christopher Beam and Catarina Saraiva
March 15, 2024 at 9:00 AM UTC
Updated on
March 15, 2024 at 2:23 PM UTC
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Maya Rossin-Slater first learned the internet was mad at her one day in May 2016, when she received a text message from a grad school friend. It included a link to a website called Economics Job Market Rumors, or EJMR, an anonymous forum notorious among economists for its freewheeling, combative and often bigoted discussion threads.
Rossin-Slater, then a third-year assistant professor of economics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, had recently co-authored a paper about the effect of prenatal exposure to maternal stress on children’s health. The study, “Family Ruptures, Stress, and the Mental Health of the Next Generation,” used Swedish administrative data to compare the health of people who had a relative die while they were still in the womb with those who had a relative die during the year after their birth. Their research found that members of the former cohort had an increased likelihood of suffering from ADHD, anxiety or depression later on. The paper was, the co-authors wrote, “the first to document a causal link between fetal stress exposure and mental health in later life.” It had been accepted for publication in 2015 by the American Economic Review (AER), one the most prestigious journals in the field—a huge deal for anyone, let alone a young professor.
Economists call for more action on harassment at a 2023 meeting of the American Economic Association.Photographer: Catarina Saraiva/Bloomberg
Now, it appeared, someone on EJMR was accusing Rossin-Slater and her co-author of plagiarism. The post was brief, linking to their paper and another study published in 2011 in a journal called Psychosomatic Medicine. According to the anonymous poster, the two “have an almost identical dataset” and a “substantial portion of the AER paper is not even novel.” The writer accused Rossin-Slater of ripping off the earlier paper and assuming no one would notice. Another comment pointed to a 1978 study from Finland that looked at the impact of losing a father while in utero on the likelihood of later developing schizophrenia and other negative outcomes.
Rossin-Slater’s paper was substantially different from these earlier studies, but she hadn’t cited either one, and commenters pounced: “Is this the new AER standard? Find s**tty papers from the past and simply copy them?” one person wrote. Another wrote bitterly: “They know editors and you don’t.” At best, some argued, it was an innocent, albeit sloppy, mistake; at worst, deliberate theft. Some posts took a sexist bent—hardly unusual at EJMR. “It is unthinkable that corruption of such magnitude would be covered up if [the] parties involved were male,” one person wrote.
The co-authors updated the paper a few days later, adding citations and explaining the oversights. They acknowledged the earlier studies but pointed out the differences: Their paper showed causation rather than correlation, used a more sophisticated methodology and had a much larger sample size than the 1978 study.
But the damage was done. On Vox’s The Weeds podcast, commentator Matthew Yglesias opined that the study was perhaps not as novel as initially billed, and his colleague Sarah Kliff speculated that it might not have gotten published by the AER in light of the revelations. (Yglesias has been a Bloomberg Opinion contributor since 2021.) The academic watchdog site Retraction Watch posted an item about the controversy, quoting Rossin-Slater’s thesis adviser dismissing EJMR as “not a legitimate source of information” and a manifestation of gender bias in economics—which only riled EJMR commenters further. Some now accused the women of playing “the gender card.”
The fallout took a toll on Rossin-Slater. “Being the target of EJMR criticism is awful,” she wrote on Twitter (now X) a year later. “It affects your entire well-being, your mood, your self-esteem.” (In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, she declined to comment about the incident.)
The “Family Ruptures” flap indicated just how powerful EJMR had become. Started in 2008 as a website to help Ph.D. students and professors navigate academia’s opaque job market, it soon became a forum for everything from ivory tower gossip to chatter about food or personal technology. (Recent, less inflammatory topics: “Canadian school flyouts,” “Headline CPI increases to 3.2%” and “Pokemon is morally evil.”)
Over the years, the site has also developed a reputation as a swamp of misogyny and racism, with a strict moderation policy but lax enforcement that’s earned it comparisons to 4Chan, the ugly online forum. (Recent, more inflammatory topics on EJMR: “Would you ever hire a hot grad student as a postdoc?,” “Why do feminists, critical theorists, postcolonial writers, etc know so little” and “Does tenure allow me to refuse teaching black people?” Those are just the printable ones.)
Some of the topics on EJMR, which recently changed its name to XJMR.Source: econjobrumors.com
By the mid-2010s, the site had hundreds of thousands of visitors a month. Now it was getting professors to revise their papers and affecting careers. The controversy over Rossin-Slater’s research also served as a referendum on EJMR itself. For some, it revealed the dark side of the predominantly White, male profession, all its sexism and resentment distilled into one hyped-up pseudo-scandal. Others saw it as a welcome corrective to the field’s frustrating elitism and opacity.
The culture war over EJMR has had implications for the profession, too. For decades, advocates for equality in economics have argued that the lack of women and minoritiesresults in blinkered, narrow-minded policy (for example, not prioritizing research on child care or on the effects of incarceration). Economics as a field can’t address real-world problems, they say, unless it first looks like the real world. Over the years, EJMR had become a symbol of that imbalance as well as a bastion of resistance to change. Its targets have included Melissa Kearney, a University of Maryland economics professor who’s won recognition for her research on families and inequality, and Claudia Sahm, a former senior economist at the Federal Reserve who in a 2020 blogpost titled “Economics Is a Disgrace” denounced the profession as sexist, racist and elitist.
EJMR’s influence has grown despite attempts to shut it down or create sanitized alternatives. In some cases, anonymous attacks that started on the site eventually broke through into mainstream discourse. In December 2023, conservative activists published what they said was evidence that Harvard University’s president, Claudine Gay, had plagiarized her dissertation, which added to an already-raging firestorm over the school’s response to the war in Gaza and led to her resignation. An anonymous post on EJMR had made a similar claim months before. (Gay has said she’s never misrepresented her findings or took credit for others’ research.)
For years, many observers dismissed EJMR, which recently changed its name to XJMR, as a fringe phenomenon. These were anonymous internet trolls, they argued, not actual economists. And even if some economists did post on the site, it was probably just a few disgruntled grad students at far-flung universities—hardly the core of the profession.
In November 2021, Florian Ederer was denied tenure at the Yale School of Management. The associate professor of economics had been working at Yale for 10 years, during which time he’d published 12 papers—including three in the so-called top five journals—and won the school’s teaching award a record three times. The rejection came as a surprise, especially because he never found out why. “It was not a particularly happy experience,” he says.
One day in April 2022, Ederer took a walk in New Haven with his friend Kyle Jensen, an entrepreneur and scientist who also teaches at the Yale SOM, and they discussed Ederer’s plans to go back on the job market. Ederer and Jensen were close, often taking their families on ski trips together and chatting about life and work at the swim and tennis club where both were members.
The two scholars made a bit of an odd couple. Ederer, who’s tall and wears his golden hair in a bun, speaks passionately about European soccer, men’s fashion, skiing, piano and tennis, all in a sonorous Austrian accent. On X, he posts cheesy econ jokes (his bio reads: “Austrian … Economist … But definitely not an Austrian economist!”) and the occasional shirtless photo. Jensen, shiny-pated and diminutive by comparison, comes off as more gentle and less eager for the limelight, though he betrays a scientist’s capacity for obsession.
On their walk, Ederer described the weirdness of the econ job hunt—highly competitive and secretive—as well as the odd role played by EJMR. When he was denied tenure, commenters on the site had speculated about the reasons.
When Jensen looked into EJMR, he was aghast. “It’s disturbing how toxic it is,” he says. “I haven’t seen anything like that in other disciplines.” (Political Science Rumors, a site run by the same administrator as EJMR, has similarly provocative content. But one PSR poster observed a difference between the two: Economists “have entire threads dedicated to their insecurities about women.”)
An experienced software developer, Jensen dove into EJMR’s inner workings. “He got a bit hooked,” Ederer says. It didn’t take Jensen long to figure out the forum’s scheme for assigning usernames: Each four-character-long code was generated based on the thread’s topic ID and the user’s IP address. (An IP address is a unique label assigned to a device on the internet.) First, those strings of digits were combined. Say your IP address was 131.111.5.175 and you were posting in a thread with the topic ID 227259. Those numbers would be joined to form 227259131.111.5.175. That string would then be run through a scrambling algorithm called a hash, which would spit out a new string in encoded form that reads e8b5eae32c2b197a0ac4cb889a9bbb8f417f3bff. Your username would be the characters in positions 10-13 in the hash, or in this case “c2b1.”
But, as Jensen discovered, the forum’s creator had made an elementary mistake. Usually the administrator will “salt” the hash, or introduce an element of randomness into the algorithm that spits out the new string of digits. In this case, the developer had forgotten to do that.
When Jensen explained all this, Ederer was dubious. So Jensen told him to post a message on the forum, and Jensen predicted the username that would appear next to Ederer’s post. Jensen nailed it. “So you can figure out who’s who?” Ederer asked. Jensen said no, the encryption only goes one way: If you know the topic ID and IP address, you can figure out the username, but not vice versa. For any given username, there were roughly 65,000 possible IP addresses.
What if they cross-referenced the lists of possible IP addresses across different posts, Ederer asked a few weeks later. Then they could figure out which IP addresses show up repeatedly, and those would likely be the real ones.
This turned out to be the key that unlocked the EJMR vault. The sleuths enlisted Ederer’s friend, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, an assistant professor of finance at Yale SOM who studies econometrics, to help analyze the data. Goldsmith-Pinkham was already familiar with EJMR, having been accused of plagiarism in an anonymous post in 2021. “I don’t think anyone ever took it seriously,” he says. When Ederer approached him with the idea of running a statistical analysis to find IP addresses, Goldsmith-Pinkham says, “it was like catnip.”
Ederer (left) and Goldsmith-Pinkham at Yale.Photographer: Natalie Ivis for Bloomberg Businessweek
Together they were able to determine with near certainty that a given post was sent from a given IP address. This was no small undertaking: Using an array of Nvidia A100 GPUs, it took four days of total computing time to run almost nine quadrillion calculations. Ultimately they were able to trace the IP addresses of about two-thirds of EJMR posts.
That ability gave them a new window into EJMR and its users. They found that while the majority were posting from residential addresses, about 10% were posting from the networks of universities and research institutions. Of those, four universities—Notre Dame, Stanford, Columbia and Chicago—led the way with the largest number of posts among US institutions. They also found that about 13% of the posts from universities were “toxic,” as measured by a popular machine-generated dataset called ToxiGen. Spokespeople for the universities didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Share of all posts from US universities or research institutions on the site
Notre DameStanfordColumbiaChicagoPenn StateWashingtonRochesterJames MadisonCalifornia (Berkeley)MarylandFederal Reserve BoardGeorgiaPurdueVanderbiltNorthwesternWisconsin (Madison)N. Carolina (Chapel Hill)Southern CaliforniaCornell01234 %
Sources: Ederer, Goldsmith-Pinkham, Jensen; U.S. News & World Report
Share is the percentage of posts accounted for by the school or institution among all posts originating from IP addresses associated with US universities or research institutions. U.S. News economics graduate school rankings are for 2023-24.
Their findings, released in July 2023, confirmed what many had suspected but hadn’t been able to prove: The profession was rotten, and the rot went all the way to the top. It also vindicated the female economists who’d been talking for years about bias in economics. It wasn’t just in their heads.
“There’s still a contingent of people that will say, ‘Well, you should just ignore it,’ and I feel like you don’t really have the privilege of ignoring it, because it spills over into real life”
The idea that women are unsuited to studying economics has long permeated the profession. Even as universities opened up to them in the 20th century, and more of them chose majors such as chemistry or math, economics lagged in terms of representation. In the 1970s women received about 24% of all Ph.D.s but only 8% of doctoral degrees in economics.
That’s when attempts at reform started in earnest. In 1971 a group of women led by Wellesley College professor Carolyn Shaw Bell formed the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession at the top organization in the field, the American Economic Association. They aimed to increase women’s access to career opportunities, including tenure, and to document diversity numbers in the profession. The committee, known as CSWEP, now conducts mentorship workshops for students as well as career economists, and it also coaches department heads on ways to create a more inclusive environment.
But the gender gap persists. Today about a third of economics doctoral degrees go to women, though they account for more than half of Ph.D.s across all areas of study. The gap starts early, with fewer women entering economics as undergraduates. They’re less likely to choose it as a major because of women’s “greater grade sensitivity” and a perception that most of the jobs are in the male-dominated field of finance, according to research by economists Tatyana Avilova and Claudia Goldin, who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in economics for her work on gender disparities in the labor market.
Goldin during a press conference at Harvard after being named a Nobel laureate in economics in October.Photographer: Carlin Stiehl/Getty Images
From there, the number of women declines in each stage of the profession: Fewer choose to pursue a doctoral degree, and even once fully accredited, women tend to leave their careers in economics at a faster pace than men. A large 2023 study that surveyed professors across disciplines found that women are more likely than men to leave academia and that it’s mostly attributable to the professional climate, not work-life balance issues. This phenomenon, dubbed the “leaky pipeline,” is especially evident in economics, where the share of female assistant professors is double that of full professors, compared to a ratio of 1.3 for men.
Some market purists argue that women’s underrepresentation in the profession simply shows that they’re less interested in the field. Others point to a self-reinforcing mismatch between the profession and women who might enter it, as many female economists sense it doesn’t take seriously the issues that interest them. Gender-focused research was long regarded as “fringe,” says Julie Nelson, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts in Boston and a founder of the subfield known as feminist economics. “You make it in economics by doing mainstream neoclassical economics or some not-too-far-away variation on that,” she says. Nelson’s own work has shown that as more women entered economics, more research was done on such topics as the economics of child care, women’s labor market experiences and women’s health.
Likewise, George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and the ensuing conversations about race and representation focused attention on the lack of diversity in the field, including at some of the highest government institutions. For example, until two years ago, the Federal Reserve had never had a Black woman on its Board of Governors.
In early 2022, President Joe Biden nominated economist Lisa Cook to an open seat on the Fed’s board. What happened next became one of the more high-profile examples of EJMR’s reach. On Feb. 3 she and two other Fed nominees appeared before the Senate Banking Committee, the first step in securing confirmation. There, Republican Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee accused Cook of “omissions” in her paperwork and “mischaracterizations” of her background.
At issue was a paper Cook wrote that had appeared in the May 2009 edition of the AER. Even before her nomination, EJMR posters had fixated on a detail that some might consider a technicality. Prior to 2017, the May issue of the journal was dedicated to publishing work presented at the American Economic Association’s annual conference, and the papers in that issue didn’t undergo peer review. Yet in a bio on her personal website, Cook had included the AER when referencing “peer-reviewed journals” in which she’d published papers. She later changed the wording, deleting “peer-reviewed.” Posters on EJMR flagged the change. At the Senate hearing, Hagerty accused Cook of saying that some of her published articles were peer-reviewed “when they were not.”
Philip Jefferson, nominated to another vacant position on the Fed board, was at the same hearing as Cook. His résumé cited two AER papers, both also published in the special May issues of the journal, without mentioning anything about peer review. Jefferson wasn’t accused of misrepresenting his résumé.
Cook and Jefferson are both Black, were both in academia before joining the Fed and had both served in professional organizations that aim to increase diversity in economics. But Cook was more vocal about the profession’s racial and gender deficits, including on social media. Republicans characterized some of her commentary as too left-leaning and said her views would risk politicizing the central bank. Cook’s confirmation ended in a 50-50 Senate vote along party lines, with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the tie, giving the Fed board its first Black female governor. Jefferson was confirmed with 91 votes, becoming the fourth Black man on the board.
Cook testifies at her confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Committee in February 2022.Photographer: Ken Cedeno/Getty Images
Concerns about EJMR’s culture had been building for years. In 2017, Alice Wu, then an undergrad at the University of California at Berkeley, released a paper analyzing the site’s archives and found it was biased against women. She used statistical methods to show that certain words (“hotter,” “shopping”) were strongly associated with gender-indicating terms like “she” and “women,” while others (“hero,” “adviser”) were associated with “he” and “man.”
Wu’s paper went off like a bomb. Women started openly sharing stories of harassment and unfair treatment, both online and off, and publicized the names of some of the profession’s worst offenders, leading to investigations and suspensions at major research institutions, including Harvard and Washington University in St. Louis.
The anger came to a head at the American Economic Association’s annual meeting in January 2018. Attendees urged the organization to do more to combat bad behavior in the profession, as well as EJMR itself.
Later that year the AEA conducted its first “climate survey.” The exercise revealed that just 20% of women said they were satisfied in the profession, compared with 40% of men. The association also put in place a code of conduct and hired an ombudsperson to field complaints. However, the new role had no investigative authority, and the worst punishment the AEA could inflict was revoking an economist’s membership in the organization—hardly a meaningful deterrent.
The AEA even tried to put EJMR out of business by introducing its own online discussion board. Unlike EJMR, EconSpark was carefully moderated and required users to register. But it’s failed to gain traction.
At the AEA’s January 2023 meeting, a group of mostly women demanded further action. In May, Anya Samek, an associate professor of economics and strategy at the University of California at San Diego’s Rady School of Management, started a petition urging the organization to help fund legal action against defamatory speech on EJMR. It got more than 1,900 signatures.
“There’s all sorts of sexual harassment things that happen against women at conferences, in person, and it’s really hard to tackle those,” Samek says. Victims don’t always want to step forward, especially if they don’t have tenure, for fear of retaliation or reputational damage. “I thought maybe we should be trying to hold people accountable for actions that are actually documented,” she says. Samek, who has herself been the subject of EJMR threads, was fed up with being told she should shrug off the criticism. “There’s still a contingent of people that will say, ‘Well, you should just ignore it,’ and I feel like you don’t really have the privilege of ignoring it, because it spills over into real life,” she says.
SamekPhotographer: Alan Nakkash for Bloomberg Businessweek
But how could anyone go after EJMR without knowing who was behind it? A year earlier, a web developer named Jesse Nickles had decided to investigate the site. Nickles runs a website called Hucksters.net, where he seeks to expose “bad actors” online—spammers, scammers or anyone else causing or enabling harm via a computer. “I wanted to bring more transparency to some of the shady corners of the internet,” he says.
It wasn’t EJMR’s “misogyny” and “racism” that motivated him to look into it, Nickles says. (Scare quotes his.) He leans toward free speech absolutism. Rather, it was the hypocrisy of the site’s administrator that galled him.
First, he noticed that mentions of a certain Fox News employee were being deleted—a potential cover-up, he believed, of a conspiracy between figures at that media outlet, a conservative blogger and EJMR to coordinate messaging. Nickles says there were several clues that helped him uncover the administrator’s identity. The IP address of the web server hosting EJMR’s sister site also hosted the personal homepage of well-known economist Stephany Griffith-Jones. This led to further discoveries, including a social media post by a “David Griffith-Jones” from 2011 promoting EJMR. Nickles then saw that EJMR auto-deleted any post that mentioned that name—which struck him as selective censorship he couldn’t overlook.
“I was truly disappointed with how much EJMR fluctuated between almost radical free speech policies and incredibly hypocritical censorship behavior,” Nickles says. “It just didn’t seem very fair.”
Nickles reached out to the administrator, he says, threatening to expose him unless he changed his moderation policy. Nothing changed, so on May 12, 2023, he posted the admin’s name on his website.
David Griffith-Jones has economics in his blood. His father, Robert, worked at a business school in Brighton, England, and his mother, Stephany, is deputy governor of the Central Bank of Chile. Griffith-Jones holds a master’s of science from the London School of Economics, and his curriculum vitae includes stints at the UK’s treasury and its Department for International Development. In 2010, Griffith-Jones took over EJMR from its anonymous founder and, it appears, began posting on the site under the pseudonym Kirk.
In an email, Griffith-Jones said that he’d been part of a small team running the site but that his involvement “fizzled out a long time ago.” He declined to say whether he posted as Kirk. There’s substantial evidence that he did, however, such as references to the same birthday and the same work history—as outlined by an anonymous website, EJMR Exposed, which appeared after Nickles’ investigation and the release of the paper by Ederer and his colleagues. There’s also evidence that Griffith-Jones ran or helped run EJMR as recently as 2021, including a consistency in topics discussed by Kirk.
After Nickles revealed Griffith-Jones’ identity, EJMR went into lockdown. The hash-salting problem was fixed. Many references to Griffith-Jones on the internet were scrubbed.
In his posts, which remain online, Kirk showed little interest in economics itself, though he opined regularly on matters of personal technology, veganism and the HBO series The Wire. (Griffith-Jones once had a picture of Stringer Bell, a lead character on the show played by Idris Elba, as his avatar on a social media profile.)
He also wrote about the pros and cons of moderation. He tried to strike a balance, saying that a 50-50 split between complaints about too much moderation and complaints about too little was “where it should be.” He described his moderation philosophy as “light touch, you won’t notice it unless you are looking to cause trouble.”
In 2011 he posted an extensive moderation policy, forbidding content that’s “too critical of someone’s personal life,” “violent,” “contains harassing content or hate speech,” “violates a person’s privacy,” contains “racism, homophobia and sexism” or is simply “boring trolling.” (Clever trolling was presumably OK.) He provided an email for users to submit take-down requests.
Kirk wrote that he was committed to preserving anonymity, but at least once he suggested he might trace IP addresses himself. In 2011 he threatened to report a user to his university, Iowa State, for a “spam attack”—a move that made many posters angry. As the site grew to as many as 300,000 visitors a month, it became more difficult to moderate, Griffith-Jones said in the email: “EJMR would face criticism from both sides, from those who felt it was over-moderated and was violating free speech, and from those who wanted tougher moderation.” It was “near-impossible” to “please all of the people all of the time.”
Griffith-Jones declined a request for a phone interview, but he made an impassioned case for EJMR via email. He argued that the site provides an outlet for people who might feel uncomfortable sharing their views on campus, whether for political or personal reasons.
John Cochrane, an economist at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, says EJMR provides a “valuable function” as a forum for ideas—particularly conservative ones—that might not be popular in academic departments. “There’s a lot of junk” on EJMR, Cochrane says. “But there’s a little bit of baby-in-the-bathwater there.”
Kevin Bryan, an associate professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto, says he found the site useful during his job search. The field is full of “unspoken rules” that can be confusing to outsiders, he says. And unlike, say, Larry Summers, who’s related to two Nobel laureates, “I have no academics in my family,” Bryan says. He says the unsavory aspects of EJMR are not the main draw. “I don’t think 99% of people who look for information on that site want to see bigotry,” he says. “They put up with the bigotry because of the useful information.”
Griffith-Jones endorsed the argument previously made by Sahm that the site is more of a symptom than a cause of the problems in economics. Academia is stressful across the board, but economics stands out. Grad students compete for a small number of slots at the top schools. Many economists argue that the profession is more hierarchical than others—dominated by the top five journals and top dozen or so university departments, leaving those who don’t make the cut feeling embittered.
Aggressive criticism bordering on hostility is the norm—a source of pride, even. “I do have an inkling that economists are singularly nasty toward each other,” says Vincent Geloso, a professor at George Mason University. (Insert “dismal science” joke here.) Professors without tenure feel immense pressure to publish in top journals. “People eat their nails to the point of bleeding out of stress from this,” Geloso says. The peer-review process is opaque: People are frequently rejected but never know why. It’s easy to get paranoid.
Still, even if EJMR is just a symptom, many want to eliminate it. But it’s not clear whether that’s possible, as platforms can’t be held liable for the content posted on them. Some economists have tried to shame Citibank, the Financial Timesand other advertisers after their logos appeared on EJMR, but it doesn’t seem to have had an impact.
The only way to sue for defamation would be to track down the individual who posted an offending item. “If we can subpoena the IP address and figure out who it is, we can hold them accountable,” Samek says. After reading Ederer’s paper, Ian Ayres, a professor at Yale Law School, reached out to him offering to help the targets of defamatory speech on EJMR seek legal remedies. “If you personally threaten or call for violent acts against an individual, it’s not protected speech,” Ayres says.
But that would require access to the trove of IP addresses, and Ederer, who started a new job at Boston University in the fall, says the database is no longer in his hands: “It’s in a vault very securely stored at Yale.” Ederer says he does know of researchers who’ve scraped data off the EJMR archives. Others could potentially sue Yale for its release. In either case, they’d simply have to retrace the steps of Ederer and his co-authors to come up with the list of IP addresses.
“I don’t think this is the end of the story,” he says.
On Nov. 17, more than 30 female and nonbinary economists gathered in a ballroom at the New Orleans Marriott. It was the day before the start of the annual meeting of the Southern Economic Association. The purpose of the gathering was to help third- and fourth-year Ph.D. students find mentors, learn about the job market and navigate the tricky process of conducting their own independent research.
Unlike other sessions at the conference, journalists weren’t permitted to attend. Few of the people involved wanted to talk about it, as if anyone associated with it publicly might become the next main character on EJMR. “We were trying to make sure the students were feeling comfortable,” says Orgul Ozturk, a professor of economics at the University of South Carolina, who co-organized the workshop. “It’s a safe zone.”
In conversations about the workshop, a familiar name came up: Maya Rossin-Slater. It turned out the New Orleans session was based on her design. In grad school at Columbia University, Rossin-Slater had been one of six female students in a cohort of two dozen; by the third year, the number of women had dwindled to four. In the late ’90s, the AEA’s Committee on the Status of Women had introduced a mentorship program for female assistant professors in economics, which had proven effective in boosting retention. But no such program existed for Ph.D. students.
So, in 2019, Rossin-Slater organized one at Stanford. Panels covered gender issues, time management, mental health and other topics. Students broke off into groups based on areas of academic interest, such as health or labor or macroeconomics. They were also matched with mentors who could provide feedback on their research proposals. The second year, demand for the program was so high, it could accept only half the applicants. The workshops provide an opportunity for women economists to share their personal experiences in a safe environment, Rossin-Slater says: “People being really vulnerable and honest—sharing that it’s not all the perfect path to success—has been well-received.”
She says EJMR hasn’t come up during the sessions, but she acknowledges that her own experience with the website partly contributed to her decision to create the workshop. “I’m sure it played a role,” she says.
At one point, Rossin-Slater solicited feedback on the workshop and found that students considered the gender panel the least useful. They were more interested in practical matters like how to structure their time or improve their research. Rossin-Slater decided to cut it.