2016/10/11 by Gabriel Emile Hine, Hine, Gabriel Emile, Jeremiah Onaolapo +13 · 3 voices · 12 citations
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Computer science #Harassment #Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection #Law #Linguistics #Media studies #Philosophy #Political science #Politics #Populism, Right-Wing Movements #Rhetoric #Social Media and Politics #Social media #Sociology #The Internet #World Wide Web #cs.CY #cs.HC #cs.SI #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1610.03452
published in arXiv (Cornell University) (Cornell University) · A shorter version of this paper appears in the Proceedings of the 11th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM'17). Please cite the ICWSM'17 paper. Corresponding author: [email protected]
openalex publication_date 2016/10/11 · arxiv created 2017/10/01 · arxiv updated 2017/10/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The discussion-board site 4chan has been part of the Internet's dark underbelly since its inception, and recent political events have put it increasingly in the spotlight. In particular, /pol/, the "Politically Incorrect" board, has been a central figure in the outlandish 2016 US election season, as it has often been linked to the alt-right movement and its rhetoric of hate and racism. However, 4chan remains relatively unstudied by the scientific community: little is known about its user base, the content it generates, and how it affects other parts of the Web. In this paper, we start addressing this gap by analyzing /pol/ along several axes, using a dataset of over 8M posts we collected over two and a half months. First, we perform a general characterization, showing that /pol/ users are well distributed around the world and that 4chan's unique features encourage fresh discussions. We also analyze content, finding, for instance, that YouTube links and hate speech are predominant on /pol/. Overall, our analysis not only provides the first measurement study of /pol/, but also insight into online harassment and hate speech trends in social media.