Recently, social media platforms are heavily moderated to prevent the spread of online hate speech, which is usually fertile in toxic words and is directed toward an individual or a community. Owing to such heavy moderation, newer and more subtle techniques are being deployed. One of the most striking among these is fear speech. Fear speech, as the name suggests, attempts to incite fear about a target community. Although subtle, it might be highly effective, often pushing communities toward a physical conflict. Therefore, understanding their prevalence in social media is of paramount importance. This article presents a large-scale study to understand the prevalence of 400K fear speech and over 700K hate speech posts collected from Gab.com. Remarkably, users posting a large number of fear speech accrue more followers and occupy more central positions in social networks than users posting a large number of hate speech. They can also reach out to benign users more effectively than hate speech users through replies, reposts, and mentions. This connects to the fact that, unlike hate speech, fear speech has almost zero toxic content, making it look plausible. Moreover, while fear speech topics mostly portray a community as a perpetrator using a (fake) chain of argumentation, hate speech topics hurl direct multitarget insults, thus pointing to why general users could be more gullible to fear speech. Our findings transcend even to other platforms (Twitter and Facebook) and thus necessitate using sophisticated moderation policies and mass awareness to combat fear speech.

翻译：近年来，社交媒体平台为遏制网络仇恨言论（通常充斥着攻击性词汇，针对个人或群体）而受到严格审查。这种严格监管催生了更新颖、更隐蔽的手段，其中最为突出的是恐惧言论。顾名思义，恐惧言论试图激发对目标群体的恐惧。尽管隐蔽，但它可能极具效力，往往将群体推向实体冲突。因此，了解恐惧言论在社交媒体中的普遍性至关重要。本文开展了一项大规模研究，分析了从Gab.com收集的40万条恐惧言论和超70万条仇恨言论帖子。值得注意的是，与大量发布仇恨言论的用户相比，大量发布恐惧言论的用户能吸引更多关注者，并在社交网络中占据更核心的位置。他们还能通过回复、转发和提及，更有效地触及普通用户。这与一个事实相关：与仇恨言论不同，恐惧言论几乎不含攻击性内容，使其显得合理。此外，恐惧言论的主题通常通过（虚假的）论证链条将某一群体描绘为施害者，而仇恨言论则直接进行多目标侮辱——这解释了为何普通用户更易轻信恐惧言论。我们的发现甚至延伸至其他平台（推特和脸书），因此有必要采用更精细的审核政策及公众教育来对抗恐惧言论。