Analyzing User Characteristics of Hate Speech Spreaders on Social Media

Abstract: Hate speech on social media threatens the mental and physical well-being of individuals and contributes to real-world violence. Resharing is an important driver behind the spread of hate speech on social media. Yet, little is known about who reshares hate speech and what their characteristics are. In this paper, we analyze the role of user characteristics in hate speech resharing across different types of hate speech (e.g., political hate). For this, we proceed as follows: First, we cluster hate speech posts using LLMs to identify different types of hate speech. Then we model the effects of user attributes on users' probability to reshare hate speech using an explainable machine learning model. To do so, we apply debiasing to control for selection bias in our observational social media data and further control for the latent vulnerability of users to hate speech. We find that, all else equal, users with fewer followers, fewer friends, fewer posts, and older accounts share more hate speech. This shows that users with little social influence tend to share more hate speech. Further, we find substantial heterogeneity across different types of hate speech. For example, racist and misogynistic hate is spread mostly by users with little social influence. In contrast, political anti-Trump and anti-right-wing hate is reshared by users with larger social influence. Overall, understanding the factors that drive users to share hate speech is crucial for detecting individuals at risk of engaging in harmful behavior and for designing effective mitigation strategies.