# Characterizing (Un)moderated Textual Data in Social Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00963 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00963/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jan 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [What's in the Box? A Preliminary Analysis of Undesirable Content in the Common Crawl Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02732/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite the valuable social interactions that online media promote, these systems provide space for speech that would be potentially detrimental to different groups of people. The moderation of content imposed by many social media has motivated the emergence of a new social system for free speech named Gab, which lacks moderation of content. This article characterizes and compares moderated textual data from Twitter with a set of unmoderated data from Gab. In particular, we analyze distinguishing characteristics of moderated and unmoderated content in terms of linguistic features, evaluate hate speech and its different forms in both environments. Our work shows that unmoderated content presents different psycholinguistic features, more negative sentiment and higher toxicity. Our findings support that unmoderated environments may have proportionally more online hate speech. We hope our analysis and findings contribute to the debate about hate speech and benefit systems aiming at deploying hate speech detection approaches.