Hate is not Binary: Studying Abusive Behavior of #GamerGate on Twitter

Over the past few years, online bullying and aggression have become increasingly prominent, and manifested in many different forms on social media. However, there is little work analyzing the characteristics of abusive users and what distinguishes them from typical social media users. In this paper, we start addressing this gap by analyzing tweets containing a great large amount of abusiveness. We focus on a Twitter dataset revolving around the Gamergate controversy, which led to many incidents of cyberbullying and cyberaggression on various gaming and social media platforms. We study the properties of the users tweeting about Gamergate, the content they post, and the differences in their behavior compared to typical Twitter users. We find that while their tweets are often seemingly about aggressive and hateful subjects, "Gamergaters" do not exhibit common expressions of online anger, and in fact primarily differ from typical users in that their tweets are less joyful. They are also more engaged than typical Twitter users, which is an indication as to how and why this controversy is still ongoing. Surprisingly, we find that Gamergaters are less likely to be suspended by Twitter, thus we analyze their properties to identify differences from typical users and what may have led to their suspension. We perform an unsupervised machine learning analysis to detect clusters of users who, though currently active, could be considered for suspension since they exhibit similar behaviors with suspended users. Finally, we confirm the usefulness of our analyzed features by emulating the Twitter suspension mechanism with a supervised learning method, achieving very good precision and recall.Comment: In 28th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (ACM HyperText 2017

Learning like human annotators: Cyberbullying detection in lengthy social media sessions

The inherent characteristic of cyberbullying of being a recurrent attitude calls for the investigation of the problem by looking at social media sessions as a whole, beyond just isolated social media posts. However, the lengthy nature of social media sessions challenges the applicability and performance of session-based cyberbullying detection models. This is especially true when one aims to use state-of-the-art Transformer-based pre-trained language models, which only take inputs of a limited length. In this paper, we address this limitation of transformer models by proposing a conceptually intuitive framework called LS-CB, which enables cyberbullying detection from lengthy social media sessions. LS-CB relies on the intuition that we can effectively aggregate the predictions made by transformer models on smaller sliding windows extracted from lengthy social media sessions, leading to an overall improved performance. Our extensive experiments with six transformer models on two session-based datasets show that LS-CB consistently outperforms three types of competitive baselines including state-of-the-art cyberbullying detection models. In addition, we conduct a set of qualitative analyses to validate the hypotheses that cyberbullying incidents can be detected through aggregated analysis of smaller chunks derived from lengthy social media sessions (H1), and that cyberbullying incidents can occur at different points of the session (H2), hence positing that frequently used text truncation strategies are suboptimal compared to relying on holistic views of sessions. Our research in turn opens an avenue for fine-grained cyberbullying detection within sessions in future work

Cyberbullying Framework and Trends on Social Media Platforms: An Analysis through Indian Perspectives from Real-World Data

Cyberbullying has become a prevalent problem that has deep effects on people's mental health and social interactions, especially on social media. This study presents an examination of cyberbullying examples and patterns inside the Indian setting, using genuine information removed from different virtual entertainment stages. The research aims to shed light on the distinct cultural, social, and technological factors that influence cyberbullying dynamics in the region by focusing on Indian perspectives. The study examines the prevalence, characteristics, and dynamics of cyberbullying incidents on social media platforms used by Indian users through a combination of descriptive, content, and network analysis. The findings shed light on the nature and extent of cyberbullying in India, as well as the types of cyberbullying behaviors, the demographics that are targeted, and popular platforms. Besides, the review investigates fleeting patterns, geological varieties, and social subtleties in cyberbullying designs, offering significant bits of knowledge for policymakers, teachers, and virtual entertainment organizations looking to address cyberbullying successfully. This research contributes to the development of targeted interventions and strategies aimed at creating a safer and more inclusive online environment for Indian users by comprehending the specific difficulties and dynamics of cyberbullying within the Indian framework

A Systematic Literature Review on Cyberbullying in Social Media: Taxonomy, Detection Approaches, Datasets, And Future Research Directions

In the area of Natural Language Processing, sentiment analysis, also called opinion mining, aims to extract human thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions from unstructured texts. In the light of social media's rapid growth and the influx of individual comments, reviews and feedback, it has evolved as an attractive, challenging research area. It is one of the most common problems in social media to find toxic textual content.  Anonymity and concealment of identity are common on the Internet for people coming from a wide range of diversity of cultures and beliefs. Having freedom of speech, anonymity, and inadequate social media regulations make cyber toxic environment and cyberbullying significant issues, which require a system of automatic detection and prevention. As far as this is concerned, diverse research is taking place based on different approaches and languages, but a comprehensive analysis to examine them from all angles is lacking. This systematic literature review is therefore conducted with the aim of surveying the research and studies done to date on classification of  cyberbullying based in textual modality by the research community. It states the definition, , taxonomy, properties, outcome of cyberbullying, roles in cyberbullying  along with other forms of bullying and different offensive behavior in social media. This article also shows the latest popular benchmark datasets on cyberbullying, along with their number of classes (Binary/Multiple), reviewing the state-of-the-art methods to detect cyberbullying and abusive content on social media and discuss the factors that drive offenders to indulge in offensive activity, preventive actions to avoid online toxicity, and various cyber laws in different countries. Finally, we identify and discuss the challenges, solutions, additionally future research directions that serve as a reference to overcome cyberbullying in social media

Towards Cyberbullying-free social media in smart cities: a unified multi-modal approach

YesSmart cities are shifting the presence of people from physical world to cyber world (cyberspace). Along with the facilities for societies, the troubles of physical world, such as bullying, aggression and hate speech, are also taking their presence emphatically in cyberspace. This paper aims to dig the posts of social media to identify the bullying comments containing text as well as image. In this paper, we have proposed a unified representation of text and image together to eliminate the need for separate learning modules for image and text. A single-layer Convolutional Neural Network model is used with a unified representation. The major findings of this research are that the text represented as image is a better model to encode the information. We also found that single-layer Convolutional Neural Network is giving better results with two-dimensional representation. In the current scenario, we have used three layers of text and three layers of a colour image to represent the input that gives a recall of 74% of the bullying class with one layer of Convolutional Neural Network.Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of Indi

Measuring #GamerGate: A Tale of Hate, Sexism, and Bullying

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

Automatic Hate Speech Detection: A Literature Review

Hate speech has been an ongoing problem on the Internet for many years. Besides, social media, especially Facebook, and Twitter have given it a global stage where those hate speeches can spread far more rapidly. Every social media platform needs to implement an effective hate speech detection system to remove offensive content in real-time. There are various approaches to identify hate speech, such as Rule-Based, Machine Learning based, deep learning based and Hybrid approach. Since this is a review paper, we explained the valuable works of various authors who have invested their valuable time in studying to identifying hate speech using various approaches