Grounding Toxicity in Real-World Events across Languages

TL;DR

This study explores how real-world events influence online toxicity across multiple languages by analyzing a large Reddit dataset, revealing complex variations and interactions in toxic behavior related to social and political events.

Contribution

It provides a multilingual, large-scale analysis of the impact of real-world events on online toxicity, with data and code released for future research.

Findings

Significant variation in toxicity across events and languages

Toxicity correlates with specific social and political events

Complex interactions influence toxicity dynamics

Abstract

Social media conversations frequently suffer from toxicity, creating significant issues for users, moderators, and entire communities. Events in the real world, like elections or conflicts, can initiate and escalate toxic behavior online. Our study investigates how real-world events influence the origin and spread of toxicity in online discussions across various languages and regions. We gathered Reddit data comprising 4.5 million comments from 31 thousand posts in six different languages (Dutch, English, German, Arabic, Turkish and Spanish). We target fifteen major social and political world events that occurred between 2020 and 2023. We observe significant variations in toxicity, negative sentiment, and emotion expressions across different events and language communities, showing that toxicity is a complex phenomenon in which many different factors interact and still need to be investigated. We will release the data for further research along with our code.