WARNING:
This article examines toxic language on Reddit. This is an important topic to explore because language is powerful and affects people. The language we explore may also affect you; please do not continue if you feel language you could encounter could be harmful. In the article, we have limited the use of derogatory, hateful, or offensive language and where it is used asterisks replace some letters in selected words. This is an acknowledgement that the word is toxic, but we are aware that its meaning is still present; an asterisk does not blunt the power of words. Visualizations do include words as they were found on Reddit.

The Look of Hate on Reddit

Have you ever awoken at three in the morning wondering about the name of the restaurant in Bruges that had the breathtaking borscht? Someone on social media will be able to answer that question. There is much to like about social media; you can get answers to those middle-of-the-night questions and connect with friends, family, groups, and even the members of your seventh grade basketball team. Reddit, one social media platform, focuses on sharing information rather than building social relationships. Reddit's micro-communities, called subreddits, focus on broad topics like investments or news and also very specialized topics. One subreddit (r/Bronica -- the r/ shows that Bronica is a subreddit) focuses on medium-format film cameras made by Bronica. Wondering how to prevent light leaks from affecting your photos? This is the place to go. There is also a dark side to social media: profanity, abusive language, bullying, and misinformation. There is evidence that online hate encourages the fear of offline repercussions and some argue that online hate leads to offline violence. Reddit is especially prone to these darker aspects of social media since authors are known only by their screen names and their use of Reddit is not motivated by building a social network. It is easier to make inflammatory comments when you are anonymous and nobody in your social circles will know about them. Each subreddit is moderated and may have unwritten norms or written standards of conduct, but how intensely they are enforced varies. However, as of 2021, Reddit was not participating in a code of conduct intended to address illegal hate speech online that was agreed to by the European Commission and many other social media sites including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Snapchat.

What is the reality of foul language on Reddit?

To find out, we collected all of the comments posted to Reddit in January 2022 that contained terms that would be generally considered socially unacceptable. We ended up with 206,606 comments in this primary corpus (also referred to as the foul-language corpus) after removing duplicates and advertisements for suspected pornography websites. We also collected a reference corpus from the same month with a selection of 46,274 Reddit comments that were posted publicly. The comments in the reference corpus do not necessarily include any of the socially unacceptable words, but they may. Context matters. Not every comment with a foul word is hateful or toxic. A word may be used to emphasize a positive sentiment. It's abso-f*cking-lutely possible. Or a word's use may be acceptable among some members of a subgroup, but not by others who do not belong to the group. To find out, we collected all of the comments posted to Reddit in January 2022 that contained terms that would be generally considered socially unacceptable. We ended up with 206,606 comments in this primary corpus (also referred to as the foul-language corpus) after removing duplicates and advertisements for suspected pornography websites. We also collected a reference corpus from the same month with a selection of 46,274 Reddit comments that were posted publicly. The comments in the reference corpus do not necessarily include any of the socially unacceptable words, but they may. Context matters. Not every comment with a foul word is hateful or toxic. A word may be used to emphasize a positive sentiment. It's abso-f*cking-lutely possible. Or a word's use may be acceptable among some members of a subgroup, but not by others who do not belong to the group. We examined these foul-language comments by classifying them into groups: hateful, offensive, or neither. We did this by using Twitter tweets that had been categorized by other people to create a model that learned how to separate the tweets into the categories. Then we applied that model to our Reddit comments. Hateful comments are 20.54 % of the foul comments, 34.58% are offensive, and 44.88% are classified as neither. Comments in the neither category are not suitable for reading aloud to young children they just did not satisfy the requirements to be labeled as hateful or offensive. This is one comment categorized as neither: *“Never really loved egg sl\*t when i had it like 10 yrs ago. Tried two sandwiches and wasn’t impressed at all.”* The word that made this comment part of the foul language corpus could be a speech to text error of the word “salad.” Another example: *“No! That is your interpretation that suits your agenda. As someone who lost hundreds of friends to HIV/Aids over the years, I practice SAFE SEX protocols even at GHs and Bath Houses. It WORKS. One can be a sl\*t and stay SAFE. 40 years of sl\*tting around and having fun and still HIV Neg, so you cannot assume.”* Though both of those examples include words in our foul words list, they seem to rightly belong to the neither hateful nor offensive category. This categorization is not perfect, though. *“She really is a wanton sl\*t, begging to be degraded to a stranger online, isn't she? I will degrade her, not to worry.”* was also categorized as neither hateful nor offensive, but it is degrading and could be categorized differently. If it was feasible for humans to categorize every comment instead of using the power of a model to do all of the work, there would still be disagreements about whether a comment is hateful or offensive. The boundaries between hateful, offensive, and neither categories can be difficult to distinguish and vary from person to person or from time to time. Human judgment can change.