Abstract

While online social media offers a way for ignored or stifled voices to be heard, it also allows users a platform to spread hateful speech. Such speech usually originates in fringe communities, yet it can spill over into mainstream channels. In this paper, we measure the impact of joining fringe hateful communities in terms of hate speech propagated to the rest of the social network. We leverage data from Reddit to assess the effect of joining one type of echo chamber: a digital community of like-minded users exhibiting hateful behavior. We measure members' usage of hate speech outside the studied community before and after they become active participants. Using Interrupted Time Series (ITS) analysis as a causal inference method, we gauge the spillover effect, in which hateful language from within a certain community can spread outside that community by using the level of out-of-community hate word usage as a …

Metadata

publication

2022 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks …, 2022

year

2022

publication date

2022/11/10

authors

Matheus Schmitz, Goran Muric, Keith Burghardt

link

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10068644/

resource_link

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.08697

conference

2022 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)

pages

139-146

publisher

IEEE