@inproceedings{marzea-etal-2025-social,
    title = "Social Hatred: Efficient Multimodal Detection of Hatemongers",
    author = "Marzea, Tom  and
      Israeli, Abraham  and
      Tsur, Oren",
    editor = "Calabrese, Agostina  and
      de Kock, Christine  and
      Nozza, Debora  and
      Plaza-del-Arco, Flor Miriam  and
      Talat, Zeerak  and
      Vargas, Francielle",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the The 9th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.woah-1.26/",
    pages = "284--298",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-105-6",
    abstract = "Automatic detection of online hate speech serves as a crucial step in the detoxification of the online discourse. Moreover, accurate classification can promote a better understanding of the proliferation of hate as a social phenomenon.While most prior work focus on the detection of hateful utterances, we argue that focusing on the user level is as important, albeit challenging. In this paper we consider a multimodal aggregative approach for the detection of hate-mongers, taking into account the potentially hateful texts, user activity, and the user network.Evaluating our method on three unique datasets X (Twitter), Gab, and Parler we show that processing a user{'}s texts in her social context significantly improves the detection of hate mongers, compared to previously used text and graph-based methods. We offer comprehensive set of results obtained in different experimental settings as well as qualitative analysis of illustrative cases.Our method can be used to improve the classification of coded messages, dog-whistling, and racial gas-lighting, as well as to inform intervention measures. Moreover, we demonstrate that our multimodal approach performs well across very different content platforms and over large datasets and networks."
}