# A Survey of Online Hate Speech through the Causal Lens

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.08120 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08120/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [HateBERT: Retraining BERT for Abusive Language Detection in English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12472/) (2020)
- [Conversations Gone Awry: Detecting Early Signs of Conversational Failure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.05345/) (2018)
- [Text and Causal Inference: A Review of Using Text to Remove Confounding from Causal Estimates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00649/) (2020)
- [Tackling Online Abuse: A Survey of Automated Abuse Detection Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06024/) (2019)
- [Causal BERT : Language models for causality detection between events expressed in text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05453/) (2020)
- [The Effect of Extremist Violence on Hateful Speech Online](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05704/) (2018)
- [Quarantined! Examining the Effects of a Community-Wide Moderation Intervention on Reddit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11483/) (2020)
- [A Web of Hate: Tackling Hateful Speech in Online Social Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.10159/) (2017)
- [Does Terrorism Trigger Online Hate Speech? On the Association of Events and Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14733/) (2020)
- [Behavior Change in Response to Subreddit Bans and External Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01793/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [HateCOT: An Explanation-Enhanced Dataset for Generalizable Offensive Speech Detection via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11456/) (2024)
- [Overview of the HASOC Subtrack at FIRE 2023: Identification of Tokens Contributing to Explicit Hate in English by Span Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09834/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The societal issue of digital hostility has previously attracted a lot of attention. The topic counts an ample body of literature, yet remains prominent and challenging as ever due to its subjective nature. We posit that a better understanding of this problem will require the use of causal inference frameworks. This survey summarises the relevant research that revolves around estimations of causal effects related to online hate speech. Initially, we provide an argumentation as to why re-establishing the exploration of hate speech in causal terms is of the essence. Following that, we give an overview of the leading studies classified with respect to the direction of their outcomes, as well as an outline of all related research, and a summary of open research problems that can influence future work on the topic.