Analyzing Toxicity in Deep Conversations: A Reddit Case Study

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Hauptverfasser: Shankaran, Vigneshwaran, Sharma, Rajesh
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Shankaran, Vigneshwaran
Sharma, Rajesh
author_facet Shankaran, Vigneshwaran
Sharma, Rajesh
contents Online social media has become increasingly popular in recent years due to its ease of access and ability to connect with others. One of social media's main draws is its anonymity, allowing users to share their thoughts and opinions without fear of judgment or retribution. This anonymity has also made social media prone to harmful content, which requires moderation to ensure responsible and productive use. Several methods using artificial intelligence have been employed to detect harmful content. However, conversation and contextual analysis of hate speech are still understudied. Most promising works only analyze a single text at a time rather than the conversation supporting it. In this work, we employ a tree-based approach to understand how users behave concerning toxicity in public conversation settings. To this end, we collect both the posts and the comment sections of the top 100 posts from 8 Reddit communities that allow profanity, totaling over 1 million responses. We find that toxic comments increase the likelihood of subsequent toxic comments being produced in online conversations. Our analysis also shows that immediate context plays a vital role in shaping a response rather than the original post. We also study the effect of consensual profanity and observe overlapping similarities with non-consensual profanity in terms of user behavior and patterns.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_07879
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Analyzing Toxicity in Deep Conversations: A Reddit Case Study
Shankaran, Vigneshwaran
Sharma, Rajesh
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Social and Information Networks
Online social media has become increasingly popular in recent years due to its ease of access and ability to connect with others. One of social media's main draws is its anonymity, allowing users to share their thoughts and opinions without fear of judgment or retribution. This anonymity has also made social media prone to harmful content, which requires moderation to ensure responsible and productive use. Several methods using artificial intelligence have been employed to detect harmful content. However, conversation and contextual analysis of hate speech are still understudied. Most promising works only analyze a single text at a time rather than the conversation supporting it. In this work, we employ a tree-based approach to understand how users behave concerning toxicity in public conversation settings. To this end, we collect both the posts and the comment sections of the top 100 posts from 8 Reddit communities that allow profanity, totaling over 1 million responses. We find that toxic comments increase the likelihood of subsequent toxic comments being produced in online conversations. Our analysis also shows that immediate context plays a vital role in shaping a response rather than the original post. We also study the effect of consensual profanity and observe overlapping similarities with non-consensual profanity in terms of user behavior and patterns.
title Analyzing Toxicity in Deep Conversations: A Reddit Case Study
topic Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.07879