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International Conference on Social Informatics

SocInfo 2018: Social Informatics pp 487–504Cite as

Vitriol on Social Media: Curation and Investigation

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11185))

Abstract

Our online discourse is too often characterized by vitriol. Distinct from hate speech and bullying, vitriol corresponds to a persistent coarsening of the discourse that leads to a cumulative corrosive effect. And yet, vitriol itself is challenging to formally define and study in a rigorous way. Toward bridging this gap, we present in this paper the design of a vitriol curation framework that serves as an initial step toward extracting vitriolic posts from social media with high confidence. We investigate a large collection of vitriolic posts sampled from Twitter, where we examine both user-level and post-level characteristics of vitriol. We find key characteristics of vitriol that can distinguish it from non-vitriol, including aspects of popularity, network, sentiment, language structure, and content.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    All data, annotated samples, code, and experiments are available at https://github.com/xing-zhao/Vitriol-on-Social-Media.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, 77840, USA

    Xing Zhao & James Caverlee

Authors
  1. Xing Zhao
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  2. James Caverlee
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xing Zhao .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Koblenz, Koblenz, Germany

    Steffen Staab

  2. National Research University Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Olessia Koltsova

  3. National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

    Dmitry I. Ignatov

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Zhao, X., Caverlee, J. (2018). Vitriol on Social Media: Curation and Investigation. In: Staab, S., Koltsova, O., Ignatov, D. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11185. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01129-1_30

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01129-1_30

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-01128-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-01129-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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