A comparative study of the characteristics of hate speech propagators and their behaviours over Twitter social media platform

Abstract

The internet and social media have facilitated diverse communication genres, enabling widespread and rapid opinions-sharing. However, hate speech imposes a contemporary challenge on individuals and communities, given the user anonymity, freedom, and inadequate regulation. Therefore, it is imperative to identify the perpetrators responsible for spreading hate content and examine their behaviour to prevent and mitigate the negative impact. This study aimed to compare the characteristics of hate speech propagators and their behaviour with non-hate users on Twitter for the first time in Sri Lanka. The intrinsic and extrinsic profile features were extensively analyzed, employing Sinhala and English text analysis techniques. A corpus of 102882 posts from 530 hate and non-hate Twitter user profiles was selected for the study. This study investigates the unique characteristics of hate speech propagators and non-hate users by examining their profile self-presentation, conducting social network analysis, and analyzing sentiment and emotion through linguistic analysis. Hate users often refrained from expression, with infrequent account verification and geotagging. They tend to have a higher follower and following counts and more favourites, group memberships, and statuses than non-hate users. However, general Twitter user engagement with hate users was significantly low, with fewer likes, retweets, and replies. The limited involvement of normal users with hate content indicates that audiences can be effectively utilized to combat hate speech. The sentiment analysis between languages showed polarisation of negative tweets towards Sinhala, with the synergistic effect of English language users using positive sentiment to spread hate content. The novel findings shed light on the characteristics of hate users, facilitating their early detection and moderation of hate speech and aiding in developing algorithms to rank and categorize hate users using artificial intelligence. Moreover, it can be used for policy reforms, awareness programmes, and building social cohesion while combating hate speech.