Reading In-Between the Lines: An Analysis of Dissenter
Erik Rye, Jeremy Blackburn, Robert Beverly

TL;DR
This study analyzes Dissenter, a platform enabling anonymous, overlay-based discussions on web pages, examining its user behavior, comment toxicity, and political bias over 14 months with 1.68 million comments.
Contribution
It provides a comprehensive analysis of Dissenter's user interactions, toxicity levels, and political bias, offering insights into unmoderated online discussions.
Findings
High comment toxicity associated with certain websites
Left- and right-leaning content have different toxicity patterns
A core group of highly toxic users identified
Abstract
Efforts by content creators and social networks to enforce legal and policy-based norms, e.g. blocking hate speech and users, has driven the rise of unrestricted communication platforms. One such recent effort is Dissenter, a browser and web application that provides a conversational overlay for any web page. These conversations hide in plain sight - users of Dissenter can see and participate in this conversation, whereas visitors using other browsers are oblivious to their existence. Further, the website and content owners have no power over the conversation as it resides in an overlay outside their control. In this work, we obtain a history of Dissenter comments, users, and the websites being discussed, from the initial release of Dissenter in Feb. 2019 through Apr. 2020 (14 months). Our corpus consists of approximately 1.68M comments made by 101k users commenting on 588k distinct…
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Taxonomy
TopicsHate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Spam and Phishing Detection
