been identified as a major threat on online social media platforms. Pew Research Center [13] reports that among 4248 adults in the United States, 41% have personally experienced harassing behavior online, whereas 66% witnessed harassment directed towards others. Around 22% of adults have experienced offensive name-calling, purposeful embarrassment (22%), physical threats (10%), and sexual harassment (6%), among other types of harassment. Social media platforms are the most prominent grounds for such toxic behavior. Even though they often provide ways of flagging offensive and hateful content, only 17% of all adults have flagged harassing conversation, whereas only 12% of adults have reported someone for such acts [13].

As complex data becomes the norm, greater understanding of machine learning (ML) applications is needed for content marketers. Unstructured data, scattered across platforms in multiple forms, impedes performance and user experience. Automated classification offers a solution to this. We compare three state-of-the-art ML techniques for multilabel classification-Random Forest, K-Nearest Neighbor, and Neural Network-to automatically tag and classify online news articles. Neural Network performs the best, yielding an F1 Score of 70% and provides satisfactory cross-platform applicability on the same organisation's YouTube content. The developed model can automatically label 99.6% of the unlabelled website and 96.1% of the unlabelled YouTube content. Thus, we contribute to marketing literature via comparative evaluation of ML models for multilabel content classification, and cross-channel validation for a different type of content. Results suggest that organisations may optimise ML to auto-tag content across various platforms, opening avenues for aggregated analyses of content performance.

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In this research, we evaluate four widely used face detection tools, which are Face++, IBM Bluemix Visual Recognition, AWS Rekognition, and Microsoft Azure Face API, using multiple datasets to determine their accuracy in inferring user attributes, including gender, race, and age. Results show that the tools are generally proficient at determining gender, with accuracy rates greater than 90%, except for IBM Bluemix. Concerning race, only one of the four tools provides this capability, Face++, with an accuracy rate of greater than 90%, although the evaluation was performed on a high-quality dataset. Inferring age appears to be a challenging problem, as all four tools performed poorly. The findings of our quantitative evaluation are helpful for future computational social science research using these tools, as their accuracy needs to be taken into account when applied to classifying individuals on social media and other contexts. Triangulation and manual verification are suggested for researchers employing these tools.

Online social media platforms generally attempt to mitigate hateful expressions, as these comments can be detrimental to the health of the community. However, automatically identifying hateful comments can be challenging. We manually label 5,143 hateful expressions posted to YouTube and Facebook videos among a dataset of 137,098 comments from an online news media. We then create a granular taxonomy of different types and targets of online hate and train machine learning models to automatically detect and classify the hateful comments in the full dataset. Our contribution is twofold: 1) creating a granular taxonomy for hateful online comments that includes both types and targets of hateful comments, and 2) experimenting with machine learning, including Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, Random Forest, Adaboost, and Linear SVM, to generate a multiclass, multilabel classification model that automatically detects and categorizes hateful comments in the context of online news media. We find that the best performing model is Linear SVM, with an average F1 score of 0.79 using TF-IDF features. We validate the model by testing its predictive ability, and, relatedly, provide insights on distinct types of hate speech taking place on social media.