Investigating Toxicity Across Multiple Reddit Communities, Users, and Moderators

Abstract

Online platforms like Reddit enable users to build communities and converse about diverse topics and interests. However, with the increasing number of users that post disturbing comments containing profanity, harassment, and hate speech, otherwise known as toxic comments. Moderators often struggle with managing the safety of discussions in online communities. To address these issues, we need to detect toxic comments and the root causes of toxicity in discussion threads, i.e., toxicity triggers. Additionally, we need to investigate the toxic posting behavior of users to understand how it differs across online communities and consolidate our findings with moderators from Reddit. In this work, we present our approach, which builds on state-of-the-art methods of toxic comment and toxicity trigger detection. Lastly, we present our research findings of investigating toxicity across users and moderators on Reddit.