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. 2023 Jan 25;18(1):e0278511.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0278511. eCollection 2023.

Offline events and online hate

Yonatan Lupu  1   2 , Richard Sear  3 , Nicolas Velásquez  4 , Rhys Leahy  1   2 , Nicholas Johnson Restrepo  2 , Beth Goldberg  5 , Neil F Johnson  2   3
Affiliations

Offline events and online hate

Yonatan Lupu et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Online hate speech is a critical and worsening problem, with extremists using social media platforms to radicalize recruits and coordinate offline violent events. While much progress has been made in analyzing online hate speech, no study to date has classified multiple types of hate speech across both mainstream and fringe platforms. We conduct a supervised machine learning analysis of 7 types of online hate speech on 6 interconnected online platforms. We find that offline trigger events, such as protests and elections, are often followed by increases in types of online hate speech that bear seemingly little connection to the underlying event. This occurs on both mainstream and fringe platforms, despite moderation efforts, raising new research questions about the relationship between offline events and online speech, as well as implications for online content moderation.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Posts, hate posts, and types of hate speech.
Panel A shows how many posts contain each type of hate speech. Panel B shows how many posts contain different quantities of hate speech types. Panel C shows the pairwise correlations between hate speech types within posts. Diagonal lines indicate negative correlations.
Fig 2
Fig 2. Temporal trends in posts and hate posts.
Panel A shows the daily posts in the hate communities we tracked over time. Panel B shows the daily hate posts in these communities over time. Panel C shows the daily percentage of posts that were hate posts over time. Panel D shows the mean number of hate speech types in hate posts over time.
Fig 3
Fig 3. Temporal trends in each type of hate speech.
Each panel shows the total daily posts that contain a given type of hate speech over time. Some types of hate speech appear much more often than others (Fig 1A), so the differences in y-axis scales (i.e., number of posts) should be noted.
Fig 4
Fig 4. Offline events and online hate.
Each panel shows the changes in the relative levels of each type of hate speech following a trigger event.
Fig 5
Fig 5. Hate speech by platform after George Floyd’s death.
Each panel shows the changes in the levels of each type of hate speech following the death of George Floyd on a given platform.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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