Cross-Platform Data Collection and Analysis for Online Hate Groups

Abstract

Hate groups are using online social media increasingly over the last decade. An online audience of hate groups is exposed to the material with hateful agenda and underlying propaganda. The presence of hate across multiple social media platforms poses an important question for the research community: how do hate groups use different social media platforms differently? As a first step towards answering this question, we propose HateCorp: Cross-platform dataset of online hate group communication. In this project, we first identify various online hate groups and their Twitter, Facebook and YouTube accounts. Then we retrospectively collect the data over six months and present selected linguistic, social engagement and informational trends. In the future, we aim to expand this dataset in real-time along with creating a publicly accessible hate communication monitoring platform that could be useful to other researchers and social media policymakers.