According to researchers, one in ten Reddit users publish toxic posts while a similar number publish toxic comments.
The researchers analyzed over 87 million posts and 2.205 billion comments from more than 1.2 million unique users. They found that 16.11 per cent of users publish toxic posts and 13.28 per cent of users post toxic comments.
30.68 per cent of users who posted and 81.67 per cent of users who posted comments adapted how toxic they were in different subreddits.
Subreddits are subordinate threads or categories within the Reddit site. They allow users to focus on a particular interest or topic when publishing content that gets voted up or down according to relevance and user preference.
While research suggests that users actively adapt their behavior to the communities’ norms, the researchers believe that toxicity can be resolved by limiting the number of subreddits users can participate in.
“Monitoring the change in users’ toxicity can be an early detection method for toxicity in online communities. The proposed methodology can identify when users exhibit a change by calculating the toxicity percentage in posts and comments. This change, combined with the toxicity level our system detects in users’ posts, can be used efficiently to stop toxicity dissemination,” the authors Hind Almerekhi, Dr. Haewoon Kwak, and Professor Bernard J. Jansen said in a statement.
The sources for this piece include an article in INDEPENDENT.