Hatemongers ride on echo chambers to escalate hate speech diffusion

TL;DR

This study analyzes how hate-mongers leverage echo chambers on social networks to amplify hate speech and influence information spread, revealing their central role in shaping online discourse and the risks of popularity-based content recommendations.

Contribution

It uncovers the pivotal role of hateful users in echo chambers that escalate hate speech and influence information cascades, highlighting their strategic position in social networks.

Findings

Hatemongers are more connected and form cohesive groups within echo chambers.

Hateful users significantly influence the growth of information cascades.

Popularity-based content recommendations can be exploited by hatemongers.

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a swelling rise of hateful and abusive content over online social networks. While detection and moderation of hate speech have been the early go-to countermeasures, the solution requires a deeper exploration of the dynamics of hate generation and propagation. We analyze more than 32 million posts from over 6.8 million users across three popular online social networks to investigate the interrelations between hateful behavior, information dissemination, and polarised organization mediated by echo chambers. We find that hatemongers play a more crucial role in governing the spread of information compared to singled-out hateful content. This observation holds for both the growth of information cascades as well as the conglomeration of hateful actors. Dissection of the core-wise distribution of these networks points towards the fact that hateful users acquire a more well-connected position in the social network and often flock together to build up information cascades. We observe that this cohesion is far from mere organized behavior; instead, in these networks, hatemongers dominate the echo chambers -- groups of users actively align themselves to specific ideological positions. The observed dominance of hateful users to inflate information cascades is primarily via user interactions amplified within these echo chambers. We conclude our study with a cautionary note that popularity-based recommendation of content is susceptible to be exploited by hatemongers given their potential to escalate content popularity via echo-chambered interactions.