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 Incidents in Game Communities. The rise of cyberbullying and abusive incidents, in general, is also evident in online game communities. Since these communities are widely used by people of all ages, such a phenomenon has attracted the interest of the research community. For instance, @cite_61 studies cyberbullying and other toxic behaviors in team competition online games in an effort to detect, prevent, and counter-act toxic behavior. @cite_13 , investigate the prevalence of sexism in online game communities finding personality traits, demographic variables, and levels of game-play predicted sexist attitudes towards women who play video games.
@cite_61 @cite_13
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In this work we explore cyberbullying and other toxic behavior in team competition online games. Using a dataset of over 10 million player reports on 1.46 million toxic players along with corresponding crowdsourced decisions, we test several hypotheses drawn from theories explaining toxic behavior. Besides providing large-scale, empirical based understanding of toxic behavior, our work can be used as a basis for building systems to detect, prevent, and counter-act toxic behavior. In this work we explore cyberbullying and other toxic behavior in team competition online games. Using a dataset of over 10 million player reports on 1.46 million toxic players along with corresponding crowdsourced decisions, we test several hypotheses drawn from theories explaining toxic behavior. Besides providing large-scale, empirical based understanding of toxic behavior, our work can be used as a basis for building systems to detect, prevent, and counter-act toxic behavior. Over the past few years, online aggression and abusive behaviors have occurred in many different forms and on a variety of platforms. In extreme cases, these incidents have evolved into hate, discrimination, and bullying, and even materialized into real-world threats and attacks against individuals or groups. In this paper, we study the Gamergate controversy. Started in August 2014 in the online gaming world, it quickly spread across various social networking platforms, ultimately leading to many incidents of cyberbullying and cyberaggression. We focus on Twitter, presenting a measurement study of a dataset of 340k unique users and 1.6M tweets to study the properties of these users, the content they post, and how they differ from random Twitter users. We find that users involved in this Twitter war'' tend to have more friends and followers, are generally more engaged and post tweets with negative sentiment, less joy, and more hate than random users. We also perform preliminary measurements on how the Twitter suspension mechanism deals with such abusive behaviors. While we focus on Gamergate, our methodology to collect and analyze tweets related to aggressive and bullying activities is of independent interest. Social interactions in multiplayer online games are an essential feature for a growing number of players world-wide. However, this interaction between the players might lead to the emergence of undesired and unintended behavior, particularly if the game is designed to be highly competitive. Communication channels might be abused to harass and verbally assault other players, which negates the very purpose of entertainment games by creating a toxic player-community. By using a novel natural language processing framework, we detect profanity in chat-logs of a popular Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) game and develop a method to classify toxic remarks. We show how toxicity is non-trivially linked to game success.