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.
Cyberbullying in Social Media. Focusing more on cyberbullying behaviors, @cite_67 initially decompose such a phenomenon into a set of sensitive topics, i.e., race, culture, sexuality, and intelligence. Then, they analyze YouTube comments from controversial videos based on a bag-of-words-driven text classification. Also, @cite_50 presents a method which automatically detects bully users on YouTube based on a bulliness'' score. @cite_20 aim to detect fine-grained types of cyberbullying, e.g., threats and insults, with the consideration of linguistic characteristics in cyberbullying related content extracted from Ask.fm. In the conducted analysis they consider three types of possible participants in a cyberbullying conversation, i.e., victim, harasser, and bystander which is further decomposed to bystander-defenders and bystander-assistants, who support, respectively, the victim or the harasser. @cite_41 , exploit Twitter messages to detect bullying cases which are specifically related to the gender bullying phenomenon. @cite_70 , in addition to the comments posted on Instagram, they also consider the corresponding images in an effort to detect and distinguish between cyberbullying and cyberaggression. Finally, @cite_31 detect cyberbullying words and rumor texts on Twitter, as well as demographics about bullies such as their name, age, and gender.
@cite_67 @cite_41 @cite_70 @cite_50 @cite_31 @cite_20
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As a result of the invention of social networks, friendships, relationships and social communication are all undergoing changes and new definitions seem to be applicable. One may have hundreds of ‘friends’ without even seeing their faces. Meanwhile, alongside this transition there is increasing evidence that online social applications are used by children and adolescents for bullying. State-of-the-art studies in cyberbullying detection have mainly focused on the content of the conversations while largely ignoring the characteristics of the actors involved in cyberbullying. Social studies on cyberbullying reveal that the written language used by a harasser varies with the author’s features including gender. In this study we used a support vector machine model to train a gender-specific text classifier. We demonstrated that taking gender-specific language features into account improves the discrimination capacity of a classifier to detect cyberbullying. In recent years, bullying and aggression against social media users have grown significantly, causing serious consequences to victims of all demographics. Nowadays, cyberbullying affects more than half of young social media users worldwide, suffering from prolonged and or coordinated digital harassment. Also, tools and technologies geared to understand and mitigate it are scarce and mostly ineffective. In this paper, we present a principled and scalable approach to detect bullying and aggressive behavior on Twitter. We propose a robust methodology for extracting text, user, and network-based attributes, studying the properties of bullies and aggressors, and what features distinguish them from regular users. We find that bullies post less, participate in fewer online communities, and are less popular than normal users. Aggressors are relatively popular and tend to include more negativity in their posts. We evaluate our methodology using a corpus of 1.6M tweets posted over 3 months, and show that machine learning classification algorithms can accurately detect users exhibiting bullying and aggressive behavior, with over 90 AUC. Cyberbullying is becoming a major concern in online environments with troubling consequences. However, most of the technical studies have focused on the detection of cyberbullying through identifying harassing comments rather than preventing the incidents by detecting the bullies. In this work we study the automatic detection of bully users on YouTube. We compare three types of automatic detection: an expert system, supervised machine learning models, and a hybrid type combining the two. All these systems assign a score indicating the level of “bulliness” of online bullies. We demonstrate that the expert system outperforms the machine learning models. The hybrid classifier shows an even better performance. We study detection of cyberbullying in photo-sharing networks, with an eye on developing early-warning mechanisms for the prediction of posted images vulnerable to attacks. Given the overwhelming increase in media accompanying text in online social networks, we investigate use of posted images and captions for improved detection of bullying in response to shared content. We validate our approaches on a dataset of over 3000 images along with peer-generated comments posted on the Instagram photo-sharing network, running comprehensive experiments using a variety of classifiers and feature sets. In addition to standard image and text features, we leverage several novel features including topics determined from image captions and a pretrained convolutional neural network on image pixels. We identify the importance of these advanced features in assisting detection of cyberbullying in posted comments. We also provide results on classification of images and captions themselves as potential targets for cyberbullies.