Anonymity and roles associated with aggressive posts in an online forum

Cyberbullying is a growing concern in online communications. Cyberbullying has negative impacts such as distress or suicide of a victim. One common type of cyberbullying attack utilizes aggressive forum posts to insult or threaten a victim. Automated tools to classify cyberbullying may aid in avoiding or reducing the negative impacts of cyberbullying. One approach to produce an automated tool is to identify features of forum posts which may be indicators of cyberbullying. One feature of a forum post is the role of the author of the forum post, such as a bully, victim, or defender. Another feature is whether the forum post insults or threatens an individual (e.g., contains insults directed at a victim). Attackers may use aggressive forum posts to attack someone and defenders may use aggressive forum posts to retaliate against attackers. Another feature is whether the communication is anonymous (e.g., sending forum posts with no identifier) since cyberbullies utilize anonymity to reduce the ability of the victim to defend themselves and to shield the cyberbully from social consequences. In this paper, forum posts were labeled in an online forum for these features. Text matching techniques had some success in identifying aggressiveness forum posts including both attacks and defends. Anonymity of forum posts (i.e., forum posts with no identifier) was identified as a criterion to distinguish attackers (more anonymous relative to non-aggressive communications) from defenders (less anonymous relative to non-aggressive communications).

► Cyberbullying has many forms. We analyzed aggression in an online forum.
► We automatically labeled forum posts for aggression and anonymity.
► We manually labeled forum posts as attacks or defends of the forum owner.
► Aggression correlated with attacks and defends.
► Anonymity correlated with attacks positively and defends negatively.