Date of Award

5-23-2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Information Science

First Advisor

Nitin Agarwal

Abstract

Social networks or social media platforms have been around since the 1980s. With the increase of users every year, we have seen the rise of harmful content such as rude, disrespectful, unreasonable, abusive comments, and hate speech. The increase of harmful content was even more noticeable in 2020 with COVID-19 and election topics. Mainstream social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, continue to increase their efforts to reduce harmful content such as hate speech, harmful content, and misinformation. However, social media platforms cannot catch and remove all toxic content from their platforms before it impacts an individual or community. This dissertation compares toxicity at the platform level for mainstream and non-mainstream social media, analyzes these differences between the two platforms, and examines toxicity at the macro level by analyzing the effect of toxicity on community dynamics for and pro and anti-COVID datasets from Twitter.

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