Exploring Antecedents and Consequences of Toxicity in Online Discussions: A Case Study on Reddit

Toxicity in online discussions has been an intriguing phenomenon and an important problem. In this paper, we seek to better understand toxicity dynamics in online discussions via a case study on Reddit that explores the antecedents and consequences of toxicity in text. We inspected two dimensions of toxicity: language toxicity, i.e. how toxic the text itself is; and toxicity elicitation, i.e. how much toxicity it elicits in its response. Through regression analyses on Reddit comments, we found that both author propensity and toxicity in discussion context were strong positive antecedents of language toxicity; meanwhile, language toxicity significantly increased the volume and user evaluation of the discussion in some sub-communities, while toxicity elicitation showed mixed effects. We then discuss how our results help understand and regulate toxicity in online discussions by interpreting the complicated triggers and outcomes of toxicity.