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Community Interaction and Conflict on the Web

Published: 23 April 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Users organize themselves into communities on web platforms. These communities can interact with one another, often leading to conflicts and toxic interactions. However, little is known about the mechanisms of interactions between communities and how they impact users.
Here we study intercommunity interactions across 36,000 communities on Reddit, examining cases where users of one community are mobilized by negative sentiment to comment in another community. We show that such conflicts tend to be initiated by a handful of communities---less than 1% of communities start 74% of conflicts. While conflicts tend to be initiated by highly active community members, they are carried out by significantly less active members. We find that conflicts are marked by formation of echo chambers, where users primarily talk to other users from their own community. In the long-term, conflicts have adverse effects and reduce the overall activity of users in the targeted communities.
Our analysis of user interactions also suggests strategies for mitigating the negative impact of conflicts---such as increasing direct engagement between attackers and defenders. Further, we accurately predict whether a conflict will occur by creating a novel LSTM model that combines graph embeddings, user, community, and text features. This model can be used to create an early-warning system for community moderators to prevent conflicts. Altogether, this work presents a data-driven view of community interactions and conflict, and paves the way towards healthier online communities.

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WWW '18: Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference
April 2018
2000 pages
ISBN:9781450356398
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 23 April 2018

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Author Tags

  1. antisocial behavior
  2. community
  3. conflict
  4. interaction
  5. intercommunity
  6. society
  7. web

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WWW '18
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  • IW3C2
WWW '18: The Web Conference 2018
April 23 - 27, 2018
Lyon, France

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WWW '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 170 of 1,155 submissions, 15%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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