Relationship Between Online Harmful Behaviors and Social Network Message Writing Style

TL;DR

This study investigates how writing style correlates with personality traits and online harmful behaviors, demonstrating that style analysis can predict and differentiate harmful users across social media platforms.

Contribution

It introduces a method to identify harmful online behaviors through measurable writing style features linked to personality traits, using data from Twitter and Reddit.

Findings

Significant personality differences can be detected with as few as 100 tweets or 40 Reddit posts.

Writing style features can distinguish between harmful and non-harmful users.

Style attributes can predict future engagement in harmful behaviors.

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the relationship between an individual's writing style and the risk that they will engage in online harmful behaviors (such as cyberbullying). In particular, we consider whether measurable differences in writing style relate to different personality types, as modeled by the Big-Five personality traits and the Dark Triad traits, and can differentiate between users who do or do not engage in harmful behaviors. We study messages from nearly 2,500 users from two online communities (Twitter and Reddit) and find that we can measure significant personality differences between regular and harmful users from the writing style of as few as 100 tweets or 40 Reddit posts, aggregate these values to distinguish between healthy and harmful communities, and also use style attributes to predict which users will engage in harmful behaviors.