Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2401.14141

Exploring the Distinctive Tweeting Patterns of Toxic Twitter Users

Hina Qayyum·Muhammad Ikram·Benjamin Zi Hao Zhao·Ian D. Wood·Nicolas Kourtellis·Mohamed Ali Kaafar
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Also available from

Abstract

In the pursuit of bolstering user safety, social media platforms deploy active moderation strategies, including content removal and user suspension. These measures target users engaged in discussions marked by hate speech or toxicity, often linked to specific keywords or hashtags. Nonetheless, the increasing prevalence of toxicity indicates that certain users adeptly circumvent these measures. This study examines consistently toxic users on Twitter (rebranded as X) Rather than relying on traditional methods based on specific topics or hashtags, we employ a novel approach based on patterns of toxic tweets, yielding deeper insights into their behavior. We analyzed 38 million tweets from the timelines of 12,148 Twitter users and identified the top 1,457 users who consistently exhibit toxic behavior, relying on metrics like the Gini index and Toxicity score. By comparing their posting patterns to those of non-consistently toxic users, we have uncovered distinctive temporal patterns, including contiguous activity spans, inter-tweet intervals (referred to as 'Burstiness'), and churn analysis. These findings provide strong evidence for the existence of a unique tweeting pattern associated with toxic behavior on Twitter. Crucially, our methodology transcends Twitter and can be adapted to various social media platforms, facilitating the identification of consistently toxic users based on their posting behavior. This research contributes to ongoing efforts to combat online toxicity and offers insights for refining moderation strategies in the digital realm. We are committed to open research and will provide our code and data to the research community.

Explore related subjects

cs.SI

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Hina Qayyum, Muhammad Ikram, Benjamin Zi Hao Zhao, Ian D. Wood, Nicolas Kourtellis, Mohamed Ali Kaafar. 2024-01-25. Exploring the Distinctive Tweeting Patterns of Toxic Twitter Users. https://doi.org/10.1109/bigdata59044.2023.10386248

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Link prediction in complex networks via fusing node centrality and local similarity indices

Local similarity indices are widely used in link prediction on complex networks owing to their low computational cost; however, in sparse networks they assign a zero score to every node pair lacking common neighbors, which severely limits their predictive power. A natural remedy is to fuse node centrality indices with local similarity indices: the former provide global importance for the node pair, while the latter capture fine-grained local topology, and the two can be combined into complementary scores within a unified framework. This paper uses PageRank and DomiRank as two representative centrality measures and constructs a centrality--local-similarity fusion framework. The PageRank-based fusion proposed by Charikhi is first generalized to seven classical local similarity indices, and the universality of its improvement is systematically verified on nine real-world network datasets. Furthermore, the DomiRank centrality is introduced to build the DR-MD series of fused indices under a unified weighting coefficient, which overcomes the drawback that the PageRank-based fusion requires index-by-index weight tuning. Results of five-fold cross-validation together with Wilcoxon signed-rank tests show that, under the unified experimental protocol, all DR-MD indices consistently outperform the corresponding local baselines and their PR-MD counterparts on all nine datasets ($p=0.002$), and that the improvements remain robust against perturbations of $\sigma$ and the weighting coefficients within the near-critical parameter plateau; in particular, DR-RA achieves an average AUC of 0.7084, surpassing global methods such as Katz and RWR as well as several advanced similarity indices. The framework is inherently extensible, and its fusion paradigm can be straightforwardly generalized to couple other node centrality indices with local similarity indices.

cs.SI↗
arXiv2026

Chance, Persistent Advantage, and the Generative-AI Era in Open-Source Package Careers

Studies of careers in science, film, music, and books report a common pattern. When a person's most successful work arrives is close to a random draw over the works they produce. How large their successes tend to be, in contrast, follows a stable, person-specific factor. We test whether this pattern holds for open-source software careers and whether it changed when generative AI coding tools arrived. From the complete public record of GitHub push events (2015-2025), we reconstruct 102.2M career works by 6.15M contributors, and for the 908k contributors whose repositories publish packages, we measure each work's impact by how many downstream packages come to depend on it. First, we find that the timing of a career's biggest hit is close to a lottery over their works, as in science and the arts, with a small, replicable lean toward early career that grows as careers get longer. Second, some coders reliably produce higher-impact work than others, but this lasting personal factor accounts for only part of why impact persists (about a fifth in our primary specification); the rest behaves like momentum, success feeding on itself for a period of time. Third, within the same contributors, this structure did not change after ChatGPT's release. The stable factor's weight grew by about as much as it grew for an earlier cohort that simply aged, and subtracting the effect of aging from the effect of generative AI puts the shift at +0.03 (95% CI [-0.22, +0.23]), indistinguishable from zero. The success pattern documented in science and the arts therefore describes open-source careers too, and it shows no detectable break across the arrival of generative AI. These results have implications for how track records on open platforms should be read and on what to expect from generative AI for the careers built on them.

cs.SI↗
arXiv2026

How neighbourhood ideology shapes misinformation belief in densely tied social networks

With the rapid spread of news on social media, understanding the propagation of misinformation is becoming increasingly important. One factor that affects individuals' vulnerability to false information is their ideological predisposition. Despite the large number of agent-based models that focus on social influence as a driver of the spread of false claims, they often fail to explicitly integrate personal ideological biases into belief formation. In this work, we explore how misinformation spreads through the interaction between individuals' ideological biases and social influence. Our model accounts for both the strength of individuals' ideological biases and the extent to which a false claim aligns with their ideology. Social influence modifies the effects of ideological intensity and false claim alignment through network interactions. Notably, the influence of neighbours' ideological intensity on belief is strongly affected by how well those neighbours are connected to one another. These results highlight the importance of considering both network structure and personal ideological biases when modelling misinformation propagation.

cs.SI↗