Relationship Between Online Harmful Behaviors and Social Network Message Writing Style
This addresses the problem of detecting and understanding online harm for social media platforms and researchers, but it is incremental as it applies existing personality modeling to new behavioral contexts.
The paper investigates how writing style relates to online harmful behaviors, finding that personality traits inferred from as few as 100 tweets or 40 Reddit posts can significantly differentiate between regular and harmful users and predict harmful behaviors.
In this paper, we explore the relationship between an individual's writing style and the risk that they will engage in online harmful behaviors (such as cyberbullying). In particular, we consider whether measurable differences in writing style relate to different personality types, as modeled by the Big-Five personality traits and the Dark Triad traits, and can differentiate between users who do or do not engage in harmful behaviors. We study messages from nearly 2,500 users from two online communities (Twitter and Reddit) and find that we can measure significant personality differences between regular and harmful users from the writing style of as few as 100 tweets or 40 Reddit posts, aggregate these values to distinguish between healthy and harmful communities, and also use style attributes to predict which users will engage in harmful behaviors.