A longitudinal study of the top 1% toxic Twitter profiles

Abstract: Toxicity is endemic to online social networks including Twitter. It follows a Pareto like distribution where most of the toxicity is generated by a very small number of profiles and as such, analyzing and characterizing these toxic profiles is critical. Prior research has largely focused on sporadic, event centric toxic content to characterize toxicity on the platform. Instead, we approach the problem of characterizing toxic content from a profile centric point of view. We study 143K Twitter profiles and focus on the behavior of the top 1 percent producers of toxic content on Twitter, based on toxicity scores of their tweets availed by Perspective API. With a total of 293M tweets, spanning 16 years of activity, the longitudinal data allow us to reconstruct the timelines of all profiles involved. We use these timelines to gauge the behavior of the most toxic Twitter profiles compared to the rest of the Twitter population. We study the pattern of tweet posting from highly toxic accounts, based on the frequency and how prolific they are, the nature of hashtags and URLs, profile metadata, and Botometer scores. We find that the highly toxic profiles post coherent and well articulated content, their tweets keep to a narrow theme with lower diversity in hashtags, URLs, and domains, they are thematically similar to each other, and have a high likelihood of bot like behavior, likely to have progenitors with intentions to influence, based on high fake followers score. Our work contributes insight into the top 1 percent of toxic profiles on Twitter and establishes the profile centric approach to investigate toxicity on Twitter to be beneficial.