More Like this

1. Hierarchical Attention Networks for Cyberbullying Detection on the Instagram Social Network

   https://doi.org/10.1137/1.9781611975673.27  

   Cheng, Lu; Guo, Ruocheng; Silva, Yasin N.; Hall, Deborah L.; Liu, Huan (May 2019, Proceedings of the ... SIAM International Conference on Data Mining)

   Cyberbullying has become one of the most pressing online risks for young people and has raised serious concerns in society. The emerging literature identifies cyberbullying as repetitive acts that occur over time rather than one-off incidents. Yet, there has been relatively little work to model the hierarchical structure of social media sessions and the temporal dynamics of cyberbullying in online social network sessions. We propose a hierarchical attention network for cyberbullying detection that takes these aspects of cyberbullying into account. The primary distinctive characteristics of our approach include: (i) a hierarchical structure that mirrors the structure of a social media session; (ii) levels of attention mechanisms applied at the word and comment level, thereby enabling the model to pay different amounts of attention to words and comments, depending on the context; and (iii) a cyberbullying detection task that also predicts the interval of time between two adjacent comments. These characteristics allow the model to exploit the commonalities and differences across these two tasks to improve the performance of cyberbullying detection. Experiments on a real-world dataset from Instagram, the social media platform on which the highest percentage of users have reported experiencing cyberbullying, reveal that the proposed architecture outperforms the state-of-the-art method. 

   more » « less
2. Improving Cyberbullying Detection with User Interaction

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3442381.3449828  

   Ge, S.; Cheng, L.; Liu, H. (April 2021, The Web Conference)

   null (Ed.)

   Cyberbullying, identified as intended and repeated online bullying behavior, has become increasingly prevalent in the past few decades. Despite the significant progress made thus far, the focus of most existing work on cyberbullying detection lies in the independent content analysis of different comments within a social media session. We argue that such leading notions of analysis suffer from three key limitations: they overlook the temporal correlations among different comments; they only consider the content within a single comment rather than the topic coherence across comments; they remain generic and exploit limited interactions between social media users. In this work, we observe that user comments in the same session may be inherently related, e.g., discussing similar topics, and their interaction may evolve over time. We also show that modeling such topic coherence and temporal interaction are critical to capture the repetitive characteristics of bullying behavior, thus leading to better predicting performance. To achieve the goal, we first construct a unified temporal graph for each social media session. Drawing on recent advances in graph neural network, we then propose a principled graph-based approach for modeling the temporal dynamics and topic coherence throughout user interactions. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of our approach with the tasks of session-level bullying detection and comment-level case study. Our code is released to public. 

   more » « less
3. Mitigating Bias in Session-based Cyberbullying Detection: A Non-Compromising Approach

   https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.168  

   Cheng, L.; Mosallanezhad, A.; Silva, Y. N.; Hall, D. L.; Liu, H. (August 2021, The Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP))

   null (Ed.)

   The element of repetition in cyberbullying behavior has directed recent computational studies toward detecting cyberbullying based on a social media session. In contrast to a single text, a session may consist of an initial post and an associated sequence of comments. Yet, emerging efforts to enhance the performance of session-based cyberbullying detection have largely overlooked unintended social biases in existing cyberbullying datasets. For example, a session containing certain demographic-identity terms (e.g., “gay” or “black”) is more likely to be classified as an instance of cyberbullying. In this paper, we first show evidence of such bias in models trained on sessions collected from different social media platforms (e.g., Instagram). We then propose a context-aware and model-agnostic debiasing strategy that leverages a reinforcement learning technique, without requiring any extra resources or annotations apart from a pre-defined set of sensitive triggers commonly used for identifying cyberbullying instances. Empirical evaluations show that the proposed strategy can simultaneously alleviate the impacts of the unintended biases and improve the detection performance. 

   more » « less
4. Network Analysis of Cyberbullying Interactions on Instagram

   Sikdar, Satyaki; Sandoval, Manuel; Hales, Taylor; Kilroy, Chloe; Juarez, Maddie; Rosario, Tyler; Rosendo, Juan J; Hall, Deborah; Silva, Yasin N (May 2026, The 7th International Workshop on Cyber Social Threats (CySoc) at the International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM))

   Cyberbullying continues to grow in prevalence and its impact is felt by thousands worldwide. This study seeks a network science perspective on cyberbullying interaction patterns on the popular photo and video-sharing platform, Instagram. Using an annotated cyberbullying dataset containing over 400 Instagram posts, we outline a set of heuristics for building Session Graphs, where nodes represent users and their cyberbullying role, and edges represent their exchanged communications via comments. Over these graphs, we compute the Bully Score, a measure of the net malice introduced by bullies as they attack victims (attacks minus pushback), and the Victim Score, a measure of the net support victims receive from their defenders (support minus attacks). Utilizing small subgraph (motif) enumeration, our analysis uncovers the most common interaction patterns over all cyberbullying sessions. We also explore the prevalence of specific motif patterns across different ranges of Bully and Victim Scores. We find that a majority of cyberbullying sessions have negative Victim Scores (attacks outweighing support), while the Bully Score distribution has a slight positive skew (attacks outweighing pushback). We also observe that while bullies are the most common role in motifs, defenders are also consistently present. This suggests that bullying mitigation is a recurring structural feature of many interactions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore this granular scale of network interactions using human annotations at the session and comment levels on Instagram. 

   more » « less
5. Temporal Properties of Cyberbullying on Instagram

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3366424.3385771  

   Gupta, Aabhaas; Yang, Wenxi; Sivakumar, Divya; Silva, Yasin; Hall, Deborah; Nardini Barioni, Maria (April 2020, The 5th Workshop on Computational Methods in Online Misbehavior (CyberSafety). In Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2020 (WWW).)

   Concurrent with the growth and widespread use of social networking platforms has been a rise in the prevalence of cyberbullying and cyberharassment, particularly among youth. Although cyberbullying is frequently defined as hostile communication or interactions that occur repetitively via electronic media, little is known about the temporal aspects of cyberbullying on social media, such as how the number, frequency, and timing of posts may vary systematically between cyberbullying and non-cyberbullying social media sessions. In this paper, we aim to contribute to the understanding of temporal properties of cyberbullying through the analysis of Instagram data. That is, the paper presents key temporal characteristics of cyberbullying and trends obtained from descriptive and burst analysis tasks. Our results have the potential to inform the development of more effective cyberbullying detection models. 

   more » « less