Title: Spread of hate speech in online social media,
Abstract: The present online social media platform is afflicted with several issues,
with hate speech being on the predominant forefront. The prevalence of online
hate speech has fueled horrific real-world hate-crime such as the mass-genocide
of Rohingya Muslims, communal violence in Colombo and the recent massacre in
the Pittsburgh synagogue. Consequently, It is imperative to understand the
diffusion of such hateful content in an online setting. We conduct the first
study that analyses the flow and dynamics of posts generated by hateful and
non-hateful users on Gab (gab.com) over a massive dataset of 341K users and 21M
posts. Our observations confirms that hateful content diffuse farther, wider
and faster and have a greater outreach than those of non-hateful users. A
deeper inspection into the profiles and network of hateful and non-hateful
users reveals that the former are more influential, popular and cohesive. Thus,
our research explores the interesting facets of diffusion dynamics of hateful
users and broadens our understanding of hate speech in the online world.