Recent years have witnessed a swelling rise of hateful and abusive content over online social networks. While detection and moderation of hate speech have been the early go-to countermeasures, the solution requires a deeper exploration of the dynamics of hate generation and propagation. We analyze more than 32 million posts from over 6.8 million users across three popular online social networks to investigate the interrelations between hateful behavior, information dissemination, and polarised organization mediated by echo chambers. We find that hatemongers play a more crucial role in governing the spread of information compared to singled-out hateful content. This observation holds for both the growth of information cascades as well as the conglomeration of hateful actors. Dissection of the core-wise distribution of these networks points towards the fact that hateful users acquire a more well-connected position in the social network and often flock together to build up information cascades. We observe that this cohesion is far from mere organized behavior; instead, in these networks, hatemongers dominate the echo chambers -- groups of users actively align themselves to specific ideological positions. The observed dominance of hateful users to inflate information cascades is primarily via user interactions amplified within these echo chambers. We conclude our study with a cautionary note that popularity-based recommendation of content is susceptible to be exploited by hatemongers given their potential to escalate content popularity via echo-chambered interactions.

翻译：近年来，在线社交网络中的仇恨与滥用内容呈急剧增长态势。尽管检测和审核仇恨言论已成为早期应对措施，但解决方案仍需深入探究仇恨生成与传播的内在机制。本研究分析了三大流行社交网络中超过680万用户发布的逾3200万条帖子，旨在揭示回音室中介下的仇恨行为、信息传播与极化组织之间的相互关系。研究发现，与孤立的仇恨内容相比，煽动仇恨者在信息传播中扮演着更为关键的支配性角色——这一结论既适用于信息级联的扩张过程，也适用于仇恨行为者的聚集现象。对网络核心层分布的解构表明，仇恨用户往往占据社交网络中的更优连接位置，并常以群体形式构建信息级联。值得注意的是，这种凝聚力远非简单的组织行为：在这些网络中，煽动仇恨者主导着回音室——即主动认同特定意识形态立场的用户群体。仇恨用户之所以能显著扩大信息级联，主要通过回音室内被放大的用户交互实现。本研究最后提出警示：基于流行度的内容推荐机制易被煽动仇恨者利用，因其可通过回音室化交互提升内容传播势能。