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Developing an online hate classifier for multiple social media platforms

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posted on 2022-11-22, 21:18 authored by Joni Salminen, Maximilian Hopf, Shammur A. Chowdhury, Soon-gyo Jung, Hind Almerekhi, Bernard J. Jansen

The proliferation of social media enables people to express their opinions widely online. However, at the same time, this has resulted in the emergence of conflict and hate, making online environments uninviting for users. Although researchers have found that hate is a problem across multiple platforms, there is a lack of models for online hate detection using multi-platform data. To address this research gap, we collect a total of 197,566 comments from four platforms: YouTube, Reddit, Wikipedia, and Twitter, with 80% of the comments labeled as non-hateful and the remaining 20% labeled as hateful. We then experiment with several classification algorithms (Logistic Regression, Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machines, XGBoost, and Neural Networks) and feature representations (Bag-of-Words, TF-IDF, Word2Vec, BERT, and their combination). While all the models significantly outperform the keyword-based baseline classifier, XGBoost using all features performs the best (F1 = 0.92). Feature importance analysis indicates that BERT features are the most impactful for the predictions. Findings support the generalizability of the best model, as the platform-specific results from Twitter and Wikipedia are comparable to their respective source papers. We make our code publicly available for application in real software systems as well as for further development by online hate researchers.

Other Information

Published in: Human-centric Computing and Information Sciences
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
See article on publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13673-019-0205-6

Funding

Open Access funding provided by the Qatar National Library.

History

Language

  • English

Publisher

Springer Nature

Publication Year

  • 2020

License statement

This Item is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Institution affiliated with

  • Hamad Bin Khalifa University
  • Qatar Computing Research Institute - HBKU

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