- Okay, good afternoon everyone.
Thank you for coming here.
Today I will be presenting the topic
which is entitled understanding abusive behavior
between online and offline group discussions.
So I would like to began by thanking the co-authors
with the supervisor Tim Stoer and Joemon Jose
and Andrew Hoskins and Catherine Happer.
So what I'm going to do during this talk is to
go over the case study that we have done
over the last year among graduate students,
to be able to understand the differences between
two settings and sort of understand
to hopefully find--slides there, okay.
Okay, so the growth of online discussion
in social platforms in recent decades
has essentially reshaped the way
we communicate with one another.
However, this has encountered fundamental transformation,
which has produced many advantages and
also disadvantages including moderation or
to be able to moderate online systems and
to be able to keep up the velocity
in the right directions among online communities.
So a recent study, which was conducted by
Perl Research, showed that
at least one out of five people
were victim of online abuse,
most likely young ages from 18 to 24.
So it's actually described a lot of main
forms of online harassments including name calling
and physical threats and stalking
and sexual harassment as well.
So one particular and significant aspect is
understanding how people behave
inside and outside the community.
Recent tragic incidents were reported
showing the hate violence attack
during the last two months in New Zealand
and Sri Lanka as well.
So these attacks actually had some sort of
communication through the social platforms,
including 4chan or 8chan and Facebook as well.
This is how we then decided to move on
with the main reason that
we chose to choose this direction.
Finding the differences between online and offline,
is that there is a definition
found by or stated by the U.K. Home Office,
which state that there is no differences between
the online and offline discussions.
They should behave similarly.
So eventually what we wanted to do,
we wanted to understand
the differences between the online and offline.
And we're aiming to find the coherence behavior
between both settings to be able to
at least prove that we can predict such behavior
between both settings and try to also connect
what factors can be understood from or
be defined as abusive behavior
or unusual behavior between both settings.
So prior work characterized
the differences between online
and offline by conducting a study
to understand the causes for
accepting online invitation and offline invitation.
Whereas the other part of this research was also
conducted to find or characterize
the anti-social behavior, which was either led by
abnormal causes or was also proven to be
due to the setting of or features of the platform.
So in order to construct the experiment,
we began with inviting the students to join the study,
explaining the whole procedure and process
so that they can join the study.
And then during that we also added
a pre-survey link which was meant to
collect data from the participants,
data including daily activities on social platforms
or if they have ever witnessed or experienced
such online abusive behavior.
So we wanted to see whether the social has to do
with the way that they communicate or
try to at least get a sense of that perspective.
So during the pre-survey, we also asked them
to choose at least four or five topics
to also help them to discuss something that
they like because if they don't like the discussion,
they will not be able to communicate with one another.
So we wanted to make sure that
we structured the group based on
the gender ratio and background and so on.
Yep, that's yours, thank you.
That's all right, sorry about that.
Thank you, should be working.
Yep.
Yeah, sure.
Okay.
Okay, this is the
way that we were constructing the study
to be able to collect the data
from both settings, online and offline.
The first step was to collect the data
as I was explaining, then the second part
was to structure the group based on what we have,
the participants, based on the gender,
based on academic level and age.
So the topics were selected from Google trends
and also from pros and cons
to be able to stimulate the discussions.
Each group discussion was also recorded
offline, I mean, in person by the researcher.
Then the online discussion was also conducted
on our platform and synchronized
right after the group was finished for each meeting.
The meetings varied from
15 to 20 minutes for each discussion.
After that, we sent a link as well,
a questionnaire, to see
how they'd reflect their discussions.
What are the things that they liked,
or just to give an example of something that
was an abuse during the discussion.
We had 15 participants.
10 was male and the rest was female.
And we split these 15 into four groups,
either in a group of three or five.
So, to also again to be able to structure the background.
Okay, the topics that we selected was
topic one and topic five.
Topic one, it's a political topic,
which is about the death penalty if it's allowed.
Then they had to discuss that online and offline as well.
The other topic was sort of technical and social topic.
So it's about social networkers and
how good is that to the society.
The way that we structured this is to
be able to allow each group to
participate in one topic per setting.
So if they, for example, did this online,
the political topic, they should do the
the other topic, which is Q5, and so on.
So this is an example of both settings, online and offline.
So on the right you can see the offline
and the offline in-person group discussion
whereas the left is the online,
which was also about Q5,
the social network effects on the societies.
So the online discussions tend to show more,
to stay off-topic most of the time, especially
on political view and political discussions.
I will show you some of the results
in the following slides.
It is also less engaging as well.
To able to get the sense of
the findings of what we had,
we analyzed, we conducted a linguistic analysis
during the co-signing and things like that
to find the differences.
Won't show you that since I'm running out of time.
All the three that you see showed
very significant results,
negative emotion and subjectivity
and then personalities between
both settings for each group.
We have realized at the end of the study that
doing a study like this would be much better
if we did it with a peer group, a group who work
who have similar interests, similar projects,
something like that, that would maybe help
get the better sense of the behavior.
So, the sample size was also not representative.
It's a small sample size.
So it was more about exploring
whether we can get something out of this
or not as a starting point.
So, yes as I was saying,
so that will be ahead of us to do,
to conduct a longitudinal study for a larger group
and see what other things, how they behave,
and also provide further linguistics tools,
analysis, as well as I told you.
Okay, so we've showed the initial case study of this
and we also showed you the methodology of
how we did the data collection of that.
We also shared with you some of the promising results
that also need to be done on a larger scale in the future.
Okay, that's all.
Thank you so much.
(applause)
- All right, open it up to questions.
Well, let's thank our speaker
and thank you for moving forward
without the slides for the technical difficulties.
(audience applause)