Roles Associated with Anonymity

One of the darker sides of anonymity on the Internet is cyberbullying. An analysis of posts to an online forum attempts to determine whether posts are authored by groups tagged as “bullies,” “victims,” and “defenders:” Cyberbullies use a very broad and ever-moving technology. It is important to begin understanding and characterizing the various social interactions, such as forum posts, on the internet which are harmful. In this paper, the authors evaluate forum posts from the online forum Formspring.me. Formspring.me was chosen since it has been associated with an incident of bullying resulting in suicide. Understanding cyberbullying in forum posts may help build an understanding of cyberbully attacks and provide a step towards modeling cyberbully attacks. Also, forum posts are important since they appear in a variety of attacks and have features which may increase the damage of an attack such as anonymity, permanency (i.e., one post can be viewed many times), and public visibility (e.g., public viewing allows other individuals to join an attack). Analysis of forum posts is also a promising direction since there are a variety of automated techniques for identifying features of text contained in forum posts. Furthermore, forum posts can appear in response to other media (e.g. photos or video), thus identifying cyberbullying in forum posts may lead to identifying other damaging media.

This paper focuses on the first step of extracting several features which are expected to be relevant to identifying cyberbullying. Cyberbullying has been associated with name-calling or verbal attacks in textual messages, referred to as ‘‘aggressive forum posts’’ in this paper. One possibly relevant feature is the use of profanity in a forum post which may indicate that the forum post is aggressive. Another feature is the target of an aggressive forum post. The forum post may be an aggressive attack against a victim or an aggressive defense of the victim. Cyberbullying is also described as often being anonymous. Thus, another relevant feature is whether an attacker uses an identifier or has some degree of anonymity. Research issues in this paper include measuring (1) how automatically labeled aggressiveness correlates with attacks and defends, (2) how automatically labeled anonymity correlates with aggressiveness and roles, and (3) how roles correlate with each other. These research issues help build an understanding of the features related to cyberbullying and provide hints towards criteria which may be useful to automatically identify cyberbullying.

Moore, M. J., Nakano, T., Enomoto, A., & Suda, T. (2012). Anonymity and roles associated with aggressive posts in an online forum. Computers In Human Behavior, 28(3), 861-867.

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