Detecting Aggressors and Bullies on Twitter

Online social networks constitute an integral part of people's every day social activity and the existence of aggressive and bullying phenomena in such spaces is inevitable. In this work, we analyze user behavior on Twitter in an effort to detect cyberbullies and cuber-aggressors by considering specific attributes of their online activity using machine learning classifiers

Mean birds: Detecting aggression and bullying on Twitter

In recent years, bullying and aggression against social media users have grown significantly, causing serious consequences to victims of all demographics. Nowadays, cyberbullying affects more than half of young social media users worldwide, suffering from prolonged and/or coordinated digital harassment. Also, tools and technologies geared to understand and mitigate it are scarce and mostly ineffective. In this paper, we present a principled and scalable approach to detect bullying and aggressive behavior on Twitter. We propose a robust methodology for extracting text, user, and network-based attributes, studying the properties of bullies and aggressors, and what features distinguish them from regular users. We find that bullies post less, participate in fewer online communities, and are less popular than normal users. Aggressors are relatively popular and tend to include more negativity in their posts. We evaluate our methodology using a corpus of 1.6M tweets posted over 3 months, and show that machine learning classification algorithms can accurately detect users exhibiting bullying and aggressive behavior, with over 90% AUC

Detecting cyberbullying and cyberaggression in social media

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

Detecting the Usage of Vulgar Words in Cyberbully Activities from Twitter

Nowadays, nearly all people utilize the device which is connected to Internet. People are accustomed to the use information technology devices in their daily life to interact with other people. Currently, many social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube are becoming popular. This study selected Twitter platforms, which is started to gain popularity. By the rapid growth of users signing up for Twitter accounts, at the same time, cybercrime started to bloom each year in social media platforms. Cyberbully is one of the cybercrime practices which had caused a significant impact on the targeted victims. The victims experienced social pressure, which they need to bear each day while the bullies stayed free behind the veil of anonymity. This study aims to identify the common vulgar words used by the cyberbullies on Twitter. Also, this study is subject to produce essential features of Twitter based on the collected tweets. The evaluation in this study includes the occurrences of the vulgar word perpetrated by the cyberbullies from Twitter. This study detected the usage of vulgar words in cyberbully activities on Twitter platform. A list of vulgar words were extracted and evaluated from a corpus of 50 Twitter users who posted a various number of tweets. The vulgar words detection in the tweets enable the tracking process of the cyberbully activities. In the evaluation section, we discussed how the usage of the vulgar words would define the user’s earnestness in doing the cyberbully activities in the Twitter. This study shows there are users with a low number of tweets have a high number of vulgar words occurrences, while other users with high numbers of tweets but less number of vulgar words occurrences. The information collected in this study is expected to assist marking users with a high number of vulgar words occurrences who tend to have high possibilities in doing cyber-bully activities

A comparison of classification models to detect cyberbullying in the Peruvian Spanish language on twitter

Cyberbullying is a social problem in which bullies’ actions are more harmful than in traditional forms of bullying as they have the power to repeatedly humiliate the victim in front of an entire community through social media. Nowadays, multiple works aim at detecting acts of cyberbullying via the analysis of texts in social media publications written in one or more languages; however, few investigations target the cyberbullying detection in the Spanish language. In this work, we aim to compare four traditional supervised machine learning methods performances in detecting cyberbullying via the identification of four cyberbullying-related categories on Twitter posts written in the Peruvian Spanish language. Specifically, we trained and tested the Naive Bayes, Multinomial Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machines, and Random Forest classifiers upon a manually annotated dataset with the help of human participants. The results indicate that the best performing classifier for the cyberbullying detection task was the Support Vector Machine classifier

A comparison of classification models to detect cyberbullying in the peruvian spanish language on Twitter

Cyberbullying is a social problem in which bullies’ actions are more harmful than in traditional forms of bullying as they have the power to repeatedly humiliate the victim in front of an entire community through social media. Nowadays, multiple works aim at detecting acts of cyberbullying via the analysis of texts in social media publications written in one or more languages; however, few investigations target the cyberbullying detection in the Spanish language. In this work, we aim to compare four traditional supervised machine learning methods performances in detecting cyberbullying via the identification of four cyberbullying-related categories on Twitter posts written in the Peruvian Spanish language. Specifically, we trained and tested the Naive Bayes, Multinomial Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machines, and Random Forest classifiers upon a manually annotated dataset with the help of human participants. The results indicate that the best performing classifier for the cyberbullying detection task was the Support Vector Machine classifier

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

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