Hate begets Hate: A Temporal Study of Hate Speech
This addresses the problem of understanding the spread and impact of hate speech in loosely moderated online environments for researchers and policymakers.
The study performed the first temporal analysis of hate speech on Gab.com, finding that hate speech is steadily increasing, new users are becoming hateful at a faster rate, and hateful users occupy prominent network positions.
With the ongoing debate on 'freedom of speech' vs. 'hate speech' there is an urgent need to carefully understand the consequences of the inevitable culmination of the two, i.e., 'freedom of hate speech' over time. An ideal scenario to understand this would be to observe the effects of hate speech in an (almost) unrestricted environment. Hence, we perform the first temporal analysis of hate speech on Gab.com, a social media site with very loose moderation policy. We first generate temporal snapshots of Gab from millions of posts and users. Using these temporal snapshots, we compute an activity vector based on DeGroot model to identify hateful users. The amount of hate speech in Gab is steadily increasing and the new users are becoming hateful at an increased and faster rate. Further, our analysis analysis reveals that the hate users are occupying the prominent positions in the Gab network. Also, the language used by the community as a whole seem to correlate more with that of the hateful users as compared to the non-hateful ones. We discuss how, many crucial design questions in CSCW open up from our work.