Peer to Peer Hate: Hate Speech Instigators and Their Targets
Mai ElSherief, Shirin Nilizadeh, Dana Nguyen, Giovanni Vigna,, Elizabeth Belding

TL;DR
This study provides a comprehensive analysis of hate speech instigators and targets on Twitter, revealing their characteristics, behaviors, and personality traits, and how hate speech impacts online visibility.
Contribution
It introduces the first comparative study of hate speech instigators and targets, including a new dataset and insights into their online behaviors and personality traits.
Findings
Hate instigators target more popular users
Participation in hate speech increases online visibility
Both groups exhibit eccentric personality traits
Abstract
While social media has become an empowering agent to individual voices and freedom of expression, it also facilitates anti-social behaviors including online harassment, cyberbullying, and hate speech. In this paper, we present the first comparative study of hate speech instigators and target users on Twitter. Through a multi-step classification process, we curate a comprehensive hate speech dataset capturing various types of hate. We study the distinctive characteristics of hate instigators and targets in terms of their profile self-presentation, activities, and online visibility. We find that hate instigators target more popular and high profile Twitter users, and that participating in hate speech can result in greater online visibility. We conduct a personality analysis of hate instigators and targets and show that both groups have eccentric personality facets that differ from the…
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Taxonomy
TopicsHate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection · Social Media and Politics · Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
