Cyberbullying and cyberaggression are increasingly worrisome phenomena affecting people across all demographics. More than half of young social media users worldwide have been exposed to such prolonged and or coordinated digital harassment. Victims can experience a wide range of emotions, with negative consequences such as embarrassment, depression, isolation from other community members, which embed the risk to lead to even more critical consequences, such as suicide attempts. In this work, we take the first concrete steps to understand the characteristics of abusive behavior in Twitter, one of today's largest social media platforms. We analyze 1.2 million users and 2.1 million tweets, comparing users participating in discussions around seemingly normal topics like the NBA, to those more likely to be hate-related, such as the Gamergate controversy, or the gender pay inequality at the BBC station. We also explore specific manifestations of abusive behavior, i.e., cyberbullying and cyberaggression, in one of the hate-related communities (Gamergate). We present a robust methodology to distinguish bullies and aggressors from normal Twitter users by considering text, user, and network-based attributes. Using various state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms, we classify these accounts with over 90 accuracy and AUC. Finally, we discuss the current status of Twitter user accounts marked as abusive by our methodology, and study the performance of potential mechanisms that can be used by Twitter to suspend users in the future.
Abusive Detection Methods. Various supervised approaches have been used for monitoring different instances of online abusive behaviors. For instance, authors in @cite_74 use a regression model, whereas @cite_50 @cite_67 @cite_20 rely on other methods like Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machines (SVM), and Decision Trees (J48). In contrast, @cite_94 use a graph-based approach based on likes and comments to build bipartite graphs and identify negative behavior. A similar, graph-based approach is also used in @cite_70 . In all previous works a variety of attributes has been exploited in an effort to detect accurately harassment instances. Text-related features, such as punctuation, URLs, part-of-speech, n-grams, Bag of Words (BoW), lexical features that rely on dictionaries of offensive words, and user-related ones, e.g., user's membership duration activity, number of friends followers, are among the most popular ones.
@cite_67 @cite_70 @cite_94 @cite_50 @cite_74 @cite_20
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Hate speech, offensive language, sexism, racism and other types of abusive behavior have become a common phenomenon in many online social media platforms. In recent years, such diverse abusive behaviors have been manifesting with increased frequency and levels of intensity. This is due to the openness and willingness of popular media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, to host content of sensitive or controversial topics. However, these platforms have not adequately addressed the problem of online abusive behavior, and their responsiveness to the effective detection and blocking of such inappropriate behavior remains limited. In the present paper, we study this complex problem by following a more holistic approach, which considers the various aspects of abusive behavior. To make the approach tangible, we focus on Twitter data and analyze user and textual properties from different angles of abusive posting behavior. We propose a deep learning architecture, which utilizes a wide variety of available metadata, and combines it with automatically-extracted hidden patterns within the text of the tweets, to detect multiple abusive behavioral norms which are highly inter-related. We apply this unified architecture in a seamless, transparent fashion to detect different types of abusive behavior (hate speech, sexism vs. racism, bullying, sarcasm, etc.) without the need for any tuning of the model architecture for each task. We test the proposed approach with multiple datasets addressing different and multiple abusive behaviors on Twitter. Our results demonstrate that it largely outperforms the state-of-art methods (between 21 and 45 improvement in AUC, depending on the dataset). Web 2.0 has led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and applications. These communities provide places for information sharing and collaboration. They also open t he door for inappropriate online activities, such as harassment, i n which some users post messages in a virtual community that are intention- ally offensive to other members of the community. It is a new and challenging task to detect online harassment; currently fe w systems attempt to solve this problem. In this paper, we use a supervised learning approach for dete ct- ing harassment. Our technique employs content features, sentiment features, and contextual features of documents. The experi mental results described herein show that our method achieves significant improvements over several baselines, including Term Frequency- Inverse Document Frequency (TFIDF) approaches. Identifica tion of online harassment is feasible when TFIDF is supplemented with sentiment and contextual feature attributes. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-supervised approach for detecting profanity-related offensive content in Twitter. Our approach exploits linguistic regularities in profane language via statistical topic modeling on a huge Twitter corpus, and detects offensive tweets using automatically these generated features. Our approach performs competitively with a variety of machine learning (ML) algorithms. For instance, our approach achieves a true positive rate (TP) of 75.1 over 4029 testing tweets using Logistic Regression, significantly outperforming the popular keyword matching baseline, which has a TP of 69.7 , while keeping the false positive rate (FP) at the same level as the baseline at about 3.77 . Our approach provides an alternative to large scale hand annotation efforts required by fully supervised learning approaches. Since its earliest days, harassment and abuse have plagued the Internet. Recent research has focused on in-domain methods to detect abusive content and faces several challenges, most notably the need to obtain large training corpora. In this paper, we introduce a novel computational approach to address this problem called Bag of Communities (BoC)---a technique that leverages large-scale, preexisting data from other Internet communities. We then apply BoC toward identifying abusive behavior within a major Internet community. Specifically, we compute a post's similarity to 9 other communities from 4chan, Reddit, Voat and MetaFilter. We show that a BoC model can be used on communities "off the shelf" with roughly 75 accuracy---no training examples are needed from the target community. A dynamic BoC model achieves 91.18 accuracy after seeing 100,000 human-moderated posts, and uniformly outperforms in-domain methods. Using this conceptual and empirical work, we argue that the BoC approach may allow communities to deal with a range of common problems, like abusive behavior, faster and with fewer engineering resources.