In their new study, researchers examined over 2 billion posts and comments from Redditors from various communities to determine how toxicity varies depending on the community in which they participate.

In a new study published in the Open Access journal PeerJ Computer Science, researchers looked at more than 87 million posts and 2.205 billion comments from more than 1.2 million unique users on Reddit. They did this to study how the online behavior of Reddit users who post in multiple communities changes over time.

According to an analysis of user behavior, 13.28% of users publish toxic comments, while 16.11% of users publish toxic posts. Users adjust their behavior to the norms of the communities they participate in, as evidenced by the fact that 30.68% of users who publish posts and 81.67% of users who publish comments display variations in the toxicity of their contributions across different communities, also known as subreddits.

According to the study, limiting the groups in which users can take part is one strategy to stop the spread of toxicity. Researchers found a link between the number of communities and the increase in toxic content, but they can’t say for sure that this is the only reason for the rise in toxic content.

On social media platforms, people can share and post different kinds of content, which gives them more ways to talk to each other. Unfortunately, the expansion of social media platforms has resulted in a rise in harmful content like harassment, obscene language, and cyberbullying. Social media users may disseminate dangerous content for a variety of reasons. Toxic content (i.e., harmful conduct) spreads when it is published; even seemingly innocent users might be influenced by the actions of malicious users, leading them to behave maliciously themselves.

According to the study authors, it’s hard to study online toxicity because it comes in so many different forms, like hate speech, harassment, and cyberbullying. Often, insults, threats, and offensive language are part of toxic content. This, in turn, pollutes online platforms. 

“Several online platforms have implemented prevention mechanisms,” according to the authors, “but these efforts are not scalable enough to curtail the rapid growth of toxic content on online platforms. These challenges call for developing effective automatic or semiautomatic solutions to detect toxicity from a large stream of content on online platforms.”

“Monitoring the change in users’ toxicity can be an early detection method for toxicity in online communities. The proposed methodology can identify when users exhibit a change by calculating the toxicity percentage in posts and comments. This change, combined with the toxicity level our system detects in users’ posts, can be used efficiently to stop toxicity dissemination.”

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