Benjamin Freixas Emery

arXiv2026

The collective dynamics of online harassment

Fringe online message boards are often studied in the context of the extreme ideology that they produce. So far, however, not much of this research has focused on direct real-world harm in the all-too-common form of collective harassment. We directly analyze the complex dynamics of KiwiFarms, an online message board dedicated largely to the harassment of individuals from vulnerable communities. We conduct exploratory analyses of the hyperlink structure of the platform and linguistic changes over time, and prospective modeling of thread size. After establishing this broader picture of the complex traits of the system, we observe the temporal evolution of community-specific vocabulary, finding that the community's framing of their harassment targets persistently evokes more danger in the early 2020s than the late 2010s. We lastly find that early thread-growth behavior is predictive of longer-term thread virality. We discuss the implications for broader understanding of toxic online behavior and threat assessment, and make the case for studying fringe platforms as complex systems with significant societal impact.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2020

Local information sources received the most attention from Puerto Ricans during the aftermath of Hurricane María

In September 2017, Hurricane María made landfall across the Caribbean region as a category 4 storm. In the aftermath, many residents of Puerto Rico were without power or clean running water for nearly a year. Using both English and Spanish tweets from September 16 to October 15 2017, we investigate discussion of María both on and off the island, constructing a proxy for the temporal network of communication between victims of the hurricane and others. We use information theoretic tools to compare the lexical divergence of different subgroups within the network. Lastly, we quantify temporal changes in user prominence throughout the event. We find at the global level that Spanish tweets more often contained messages of hope and a focus on those helping. At the local level, we find that information propagating among Puerto Ricans most often originated from sources local to the island, such as journalists and politicians. Critically, content from these accounts overshadows content from celebrities, global news networks, and the like for the large majority of the time period studied. Our findings reveal insight into ways social media campaigns could be deployed to disseminate relief information during similar events in the future.

cs.SI↗