Abusive Language Detection in Online Conversations by Combining Content-and Graph-based Features

In recent years, online social networks have allowed worldwide users to meet and discuss. As guarantors of these communities, the administrators of these platforms must prevent users from adopting inappropriate behaviors. This verification task, mainly done by humans, is more and more difficult due to the ever growing amount of messages to check. Methods have been proposed to automatize this moderation process, mainly by providing approaches based on the textual content of the exchanged messages. Recent work has also shown that characteristics derived from the structure of conversations, in the form of conversational graphs, can help detecting these abusive messages. In this paper, we propose to take advantage of both sources of information by proposing fusion methods integrating content-and graph-based features. Our experiments on raw chat logs show that the content of the messages, but also of their dynamics within a conversation contain partially complementary information, allowing performance improvements on an abusive message classification task with a final F-measure of 93.26%

Graph-based Features for Automatic Online Abuse Detection

While online communities have become increasingly important over the years, the moderation of user-generated content is still performed mostly manually. Automating this task is an important step in reducing the financial cost associated with moderation, but the majority of automated approaches strictly based on message content are highly vulnerable to intentional obfuscation. In this paper, we discuss methods for extracting conversational networks based on raw multi-participant chat logs, and we study the contribution of graph features to a classification system that aims to determine if a given message is abusive. The conversational graph-based system yields unexpectedly high performance , with results comparable to those previously obtained with a content-based approach

Towards Measuring Adversarial Twitter Interactions against Candidates in the US Midterm Elections

Adversarial interactions against politicians on social media such as Twitter have significant impact on society. In particular they disrupt substantive political discussions online, and may discourage people from seeking public office. In this study, we measure the adversarial interactions against candidates for the US House of Representatives during the run-up to the 2018 US general election. We gather a new dataset consisting of 1.7 million tweets involving candidates, one of the largest corpora focusing on political discourse. We then develop a new technique for detecting tweets with toxic content that are directed at any specific candidate.Such technique allows us to more accurately quantify adversarial interactions towards political candidates. Further, we introduce an algorithm to induce candidate-specific adversarial terms to capture more nuanced adversarial interactions that previous techniques may not consider toxic. Finally, we use these techniques to outline the breadth of adversarial interactions seen in the election, including offensive name-calling, threats of violence, posting discrediting information, attacks on identity, and adversarial message repetition

Seminar Users in the Arabic Twitter Sphere

We introduce the notion of "seminar users", who are social media users engaged in propaganda in support of a political entity. We develop a framework that can identify such users with 84.4% precision and 76.1% recall. While our dataset is from the Arab region, omitting language-specific features has only a minor impact on classification performance, and thus, our approach could work for detecting seminar users in other parts of the world and in other languages. We further explored a controversial political topic to observe the prevalence and potential potency of such users. In our case study, we found that 25% of the users engaged in the topic are in fact seminar users and their tweets make nearly a third of the on-topic tweets. Moreover, they are often successful in affecting mainstream discourse with coordinated hashtag campaigns.Comment: to appear in SocInfo 201