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On the Presence of Abusive Language in Mis/Disinformation

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Social Informatics (SocInfo 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13618))

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Abstract

The rise in mis/disinformation and abusive language online is alarming. These problems threaten society, impacting users’ mental health and even politics and democracy. Social science studies have already theorized about those problems’ mutual spread, for instance, regarding how users interact with mis/disinformation. In this work, we propose to analyze news articles’ production patterns instead of the consumption perspective, focusing on the textual news content. We perform a textual analysis of online news and conclude that false news present a higher prevalence of abusive language when compared to real news. The found patterns are consistent across datasets, even when they belong to different topics. To better understand these differences, we analyze psycholinguistic patterns of false and real news writings. Finally, we analyze which news categories are more affected by abusive language.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://parler.com/.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/brenomatos/abusive-language.

  3. 3.

    https://developers.perspectiveapi.com/s/about-the-api-attributes-and-languages.

  4. 4.

    https://huggingface.co/cardiffnlp/twitter-roberta-base-sentiment-latest.

  5. 5.

    https://huggingface.co/datasets/Fraser/news-category-dataset.

  6. 6.

    https://www.huffpost.com/.

  7. 7.

    https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/v4.20.0/en/main_classes/pipelines#transformers.TextClassificationPipeline.

  8. 8.

    https://huggingface.co/prajjwal1/bert-tiny.

  9. 9.

    https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/main_classes/trainer.

  10. 10.

    We use the Mann-Whitney U test with \(p < 0.05\).

  11. 11.

    https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/event/kdd-2020-truefact-workshop-making-a-credible-web-for-tomorrow/shared-tasks/.

  12. 12.

    www.politifact.com.

  13. 13.

    www.gossipcop.com.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by CNPq, CAPES and Fapemig.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil

    Breno Matos, Rennan C. Lima, Jussara M. Almeida, Marcos André Gonçalves & Rodrygo L. T. Santos

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  1. Breno Matos
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  3. Jussara M. Almeida
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Correspondence to Breno Matos .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universität Koblenz-Landau, Koblenz, Germany

    Frank Hopfgartner

  2. National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Kokil Jaidka

  3. GESIS – Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften, Cologne, Germany

    Philipp Mayr

  4. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Joemon Jose

  5. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Jan Breitsohl

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Matos, B., Lima, R.C., Almeida, J.M., Gonçalves, M.A., Santos, R.L.T. (2022). On the Presence of Abusive Language in Mis/Disinformation. In: Hopfgartner, F., Jaidka, K., Mayr, P., Jose, J., Breitsohl, J. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13618. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19097-1_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19097-1_18

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