Detection of hateful twitter users with graph convolutional network model

• Published in: Earth science informatics 2023-03, Vol.16 (1), p.329-343
• Main Authors: Utku, Anıl, Can, Umit, Aslan, Serpil
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Artificial neural networks; Earth and Environmental Science; Earth Sciences; Earth System Sciences; Euclidean geometry; Euclidean space; Graph theory; Hate speech; Information Systems Applications (incl.Internet); Machine learning; Minority & ethnic groups; Ontology; Simulation and Modeling; Social conditions; Social networks; Space Exploration and Astronautics; Space Sciences (including Extraterrestrial Physics
• ISSN: 1865-0473; 1865-0481
• DOI: 10.1007/s12145-023-00940-w

Today, hate speech is widespread and persistent in various forms on social networking platforms, targeting different minority groups. These attacks can be carried out using various factors such as racial, religious, gender, and physical disability, etc. Considering the number of people and their interactions, social networks are the most important channels through which these discourses spread. The social network structure is considered a set of nodes and edges and is very suitable for the graph structure. The multidimensional structure of social networks carries social network data from Euclidean space to non-Euclidean space. In non-Euclidean space, the graph structure is used to represent data effectively. In this respect, solving the hate speech problem with graph-based methods in a complex dimensional space can produce more impressive results. In this study, a powerful method based on the Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) model, which is rarely used in this field, was proposed for the detection of hateful Twitter users in social networks. Well-known machine learning methods were used to measure the performance of this method. According to the results obtained, the proposed GCN model gave the most successful result.