On the rise of fear speech in online social media

Abstract

Recently, social media platforms are heavily moderated to prevent the spread of online hate speech (1) 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 (2). Fear speech, as the name suggests, attempts to incite fear about a target community (3). Although subtle, it might be highly effective often pushing communities toward a physical conflict (2). 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 over 700K hate speech posts collected from Gab.com. Remarkably, users posting large number of fear * https://transparency.fb.com/en-gb/policies/community-standards/hate-speech/ † ttps://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hateful-conduct-policy