Since its earliest days, harassment and abuse have plagued the Internet. Recent research has focused on in-domain methods to detect abusive content and faces several challenges, most notably the need to obtain large training corpora. In this paper, we introduce a novel computational approach to ad- dress this problem called Bag of Communities (BoC)-a technique that leverages large-scale, preexisting data from other Internet communities. We then apply BoC toward identifying abusive behavior within a major Internet community. Specifically, we compute a post's similarity to 9 other communities from 4chan, Reddit, Voat and MetaFilter. We show that a BoC model can be used on communities "off the shelf" with roughly 75% accuracy-no training examples are needed from the target community. A dynamic BoC model achieves 91.18% accuracy after seeing 100,000 human-moderated posts, and uniformly outperforms in-domain methods. Using this conceptual and empirical work, we argue that the BoC approach may allow communities to deal with a range of common problems, like abusive behavior, faster and with fewer engineering resources.
The comp.social lab focuses on the design and analysis of social media. According to their website they "like puppies, mixed methods and new students (particularly MS)."
