Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur 721302, India.
School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2023 Mar 14;120(11):e2212270120. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2212270120. Epub 2023 Mar 6.
Recently, social media platforms are heavily moderated to prevent the spread of online hate speech, which is usually fertile in toxic words and is directed toward an individual or a community. Owing to such heavy moderation, newer and more subtle techniques are being deployed. One of the most striking among these is fear speech. Fear speech, as the name suggests, attempts to incite fear about a target community. Although subtle, it might be highly effective, often pushing communities toward a physical conflict. Therefore, understanding their prevalence in social media is of paramount importance. This article presents a large-scale study to understand the prevalence of 400K fear speech and over 700K hate speech posts collected from Gab.com. Remarkably, users posting a large number of fear speech accrue more followers and occupy more central positions in social networks than users posting a large number of hate speech. They can also reach out to benign users more effectively than hate speech users through replies, reposts, and mentions. This connects to the fact that, unlike hate speech, fear speech has almost zero toxic content, making it look plausible. Moreover, while fear speech topics mostly portray a community as a perpetrator using a (fake) chain of argumentation, hate speech topics hurl direct multitarget insults, thus pointing to why general users could be more gullible to fear speech. Our findings transcend even to other platforms (Twitter and Facebook) and thus necessitate using sophisticated moderation policies and mass awareness to combat fear speech.
最近，社交媒体平台受到严格监管，以防止网络仇恨言论的传播，这些言论通常充斥着恶毒的语言，并针对个人或社区。由于这种严格的监管，人们开始使用更新颖、更微妙的技术。其中最引人注目的技术之一是恐惧言论。顾名思义，恐惧言论试图煽动人们对目标社区的恐惧。尽管它很微妙，但可能非常有效，常常促使社区走向肢体冲突。因此，了解恐惧言论在社交媒体中的流行程度至关重要。本文进行了一项大规模研究，以了解从 Gab.com 上收集的 40 万条恐惧言论和 70 多万条仇恨言论帖子的流行程度。值得注意的是，发布大量恐惧言论的用户比发布大量仇恨言论的用户拥有更多的关注者，并在社交网络中占据更中心的位置。他们还可以通过回复、转发和提及，比仇恨言论用户更有效地接触到善意用户。这与事实有关，即与仇恨言论不同，恐惧言论几乎没有任何有毒内容，使其看起来合理。此外，虽然恐惧言论的主题大多通过（虚假）论证链条将一个社区描绘成一个加害者，但仇恨言论的主题则直接针对多个目标进行侮辱，这表明为什么普通用户更容易受到恐惧言论的影响。我们的发现甚至超越了其他平台（Twitter 和 Facebook），因此需要使用复杂的监管政策和大众意识来打击恐惧言论。
