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Topic-driven toxicity: Exploring the relationship between online toxicity and news topics
Joni Salminen1,2, Sercan Sengün3, Juan Corporan4
1Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar.
Plos One
|February 22, 2020
Summary
News comment toxicity is topic-driven, with subjects like racism and war generating more hateful comments. Framing stories humanistically can reduce toxicity, even on sensitive topics.
Area of Science:
- Computational Social Science
- Computational Linguistics
- Media Studies
Background:
- Hateful commenting, or toxicity, is prevalent in social media news discussions.
- The link between specific news topics and comment toxicity remains unclear.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the relationship between news topics and user comment toxicity.
- To identify which news topics are associated with higher or lower levels of toxicity.
Main Methods:
- Classified topics of 63,886 online news videos using a neural network and journalist-assigned tags.
- Scored 320,246 user comments for toxicity.
- Compared average comment toxicity across different news topics.
Main Results:
- Topics such as Racism, Israel-Palestine, and War & Conflict exhibited higher toxicity.
- Topics like Science & Technology, Environment & Weather, and Arts & Culture showed lower toxicity.
- Qualitative analysis identified themes including graphic content, humanistic stories, historical facts, media manipulation, and religion.
Conclusions:
- News comment toxicity is largely topic-driven, targeting subjects rather than individuals.
- Humanistic framing of news stories can mitigate toxicity, even for typically contentious subjects.
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