Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

4-2018

Abstract

Over the past few years, a number of new "fringe" communities, like 4chan or certain subreddits, have gained traction on the Web at a rapid pace. However, more often than not, little is known about how they evolve or what kind of activities they attract, despite recent research has shown that they influence how false information reaches mainstream communities. This motivates the need to monitor these communities and analyze their impact on the Web's information ecosystem. In August 2016, a new social network called Gab was created as an alternative to Twitter. It positions itself as putting "people and free speech first", welcoming users banned or suspended from other social networks. In this paper, we provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first characterization of Gab. We collect and analyze 22M posts produced by 336K users between August 2016 and January 2018, finding that Gab is predominantly used for the dissemination and discussion of news and world events, and that it attracts alt-right users, conspiracy theorists, and other trolls. We also measure the prevalence of hate speech on the platform, finding it to be much higher than Twitter, but lower than 4chan's Politically Incorrect board.

Keywords

Changepoint analysis, Hate speech, Social networks, Alt-right

Discipline

Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing | Social Media

Research Areas

Data Science and Engineering

Publication

WWW '18: Companion Proceedings of the The Web Conference 2018, Lyon, France, April 23-17

First Page

1007

Last Page

1014

ISBN

9781450356404

Identifier

10.1145/3184558.3191531

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Copyright Owner and License

Publisher

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3184558.3191531

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