HateDay: Insights from a Global Hate Speech Dataset Representative of a Day on Twitter

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Tonneau, Manuel, Liu, Diyi, Malhotra, Niyati, Hale, Scott A., Fraiberger, Samuel P., Orozco-Olvera, Victor, Röttger, Paul
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866918043700953088
author Tonneau, Manuel
Liu, Diyi
Malhotra, Niyati
Hale, Scott A.
Fraiberger, Samuel P.
Orozco-Olvera, Victor
Röttger, Paul
author_facet Tonneau, Manuel
Liu, Diyi
Malhotra, Niyati
Hale, Scott A.
Fraiberger, Samuel P.
Orozco-Olvera, Victor
Röttger, Paul
contents To address the global challenge of online hate speech, prior research has developed detection models to flag such content on social media. However, due to systematic biases in evaluation datasets, the real-world effectiveness of these models remains unclear, particularly across geographies. We introduce HateDay, the first global hate speech dataset representative of social media settings, constructed from a random sample of all tweets posted on September 21, 2022 and covering eight languages and four English-speaking countries. Using HateDay, we uncover substantial variation in the prevalence and composition of hate speech across languages and regions. We show that evaluations on academic datasets greatly overestimate real-world detection performance, which we find is very low, especially for non-European languages. Our analysis identifies key drivers of this gap, including models' difficulty to distinguish hate from offensive speech and a mismatch between the target groups emphasized in academic datasets and those most frequently targeted in real-world settings. We argue that poor model performance makes public models ill-suited for automatic hate speech moderation and find that high moderation rates are only achievable with substantial human oversight. Our results underscore the need to evaluate detection systems on data that reflects the complexity and diversity of real-world social media.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_15462
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HateDay: Insights from a Global Hate Speech Dataset Representative of a Day on Twitter
Tonneau, Manuel
Liu, Diyi
Malhotra, Niyati
Hale, Scott A.
Fraiberger, Samuel P.
Orozco-Olvera, Victor
Röttger, Paul
Computation and Language
To address the global challenge of online hate speech, prior research has developed detection models to flag such content on social media. However, due to systematic biases in evaluation datasets, the real-world effectiveness of these models remains unclear, particularly across geographies. We introduce HateDay, the first global hate speech dataset representative of social media settings, constructed from a random sample of all tweets posted on September 21, 2022 and covering eight languages and four English-speaking countries. Using HateDay, we uncover substantial variation in the prevalence and composition of hate speech across languages and regions. We show that evaluations on academic datasets greatly overestimate real-world detection performance, which we find is very low, especially for non-European languages. Our analysis identifies key drivers of this gap, including models' difficulty to distinguish hate from offensive speech and a mismatch between the target groups emphasized in academic datasets and those most frequently targeted in real-world settings. We argue that poor model performance makes public models ill-suited for automatic hate speech moderation and find that high moderation rates are only achievable with substantial human oversight. Our results underscore the need to evaluate detection systems on data that reflects the complexity and diversity of real-world social media.
title HateDay: Insights from a Global Hate Speech Dataset Representative of a Day on Twitter
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.15462