Tracking Patterns in Toxicity and Antisocial Behavior Over User Lifetimes on Large Social Media Platforms

TL;DR

This study analyzes 14 years of Reddit and Wikipedia comments, revealing how user toxicity trends have shifted over time and differ by platform and activity level, providing insights into antisocial behavior dynamics on social media.

Contribution

It offers a large-scale longitudinal analysis of toxicity patterns, highlighting temporal shifts and differences between platforms and user activity levels, which were previously underexplored.

Findings

Users became less toxic before 2013, then more toxic afterward.

Reddit's most toxic users are the most active, Wikipedia's are the least active.

Toxicity trends in content discussion mirror user toxicity trends.

Abstract

An increasing amount of attention has been devoted to the problem of "toxic" or antisocial behavior on social media. In this paper we analyze such behavior at very large scales: we analyze toxicity over a 14-year time span on nearly 500 million comments from Reddit and Wikipedia, grounded in two different proxies for toxicity. At the individual level, we analyze users' toxicity levels over the course of their time on the site, and find a striking reversal in trends: both Reddit and Wikipedia users tended to become less toxic over their life cycles on the site in the early (pre-2013) history of the site, but more toxic over their life cycles in the later (post-2013) history of the site. We also find that toxicity on Reddit and Wikipedia differ in a key way, with the most toxic behavior on Reddit exhibited in aggregate by the most active users, and the most toxic behavior on Wikipedia exhibited in aggregate by the least active users. Finally, we consider the toxicity of discussion around widely-shared pieces of content, and find that the trends for toxicity in discussion about content bear interesting similarities with the trends for toxicity in discussion by users.