Online offensive behaviour in socialmedia: Detection approaches,

comprehensive review and future directions

Abstract
Social media has grown a lot, giving people a place to display harmful and offensive behavior
online. This bad behavior keeps increasing over time. The popularity of smartphones and the
anonymity of the internet make it even more common.
As a result, researchers have been studying offensive behavior on social media more and more in
recent years. In this paper, the authors talk about the different types of abusive behavior you can
find online and the importance of identifying them. They classify these behaviors into four
categories: content-based, sentiment and emotion-based, user or profile-based, and network or
graph-based approaches.
The paper also reviews the latest methods used to detect bullies and abusive content on social
media. It discusses what drives people to behave offensively online, ways to prevent toxicity on
the internet, and the cyber laws in different countries that deal with these issues.
Finally, the paper looks into the future and suggests areas for further research to tackle offensive
content on social media.

Introduction
Nowadays, a lot of people use social media websites for entertainment and communication.
These platforms have become very popular in recent years, with around 45% of the world's
population using them. For many individuals, social media has turned into an addiction.
Smartphones have further increased the use of social media, which unfortunately has led to
offensive behavior towards others.
Offensive behavior on social media includes spreading hate, online bullying, writing aggressive
or toxic comments, and sharing inappropriate images and videos. This behavior can occur on
various online platforms like social media, messaging apps, gaming platforms, and more.
According to a survey, around 44% of children and young people spend an average of 180
minutes per day on social media, and 9% of people use social media overnight. Of those who
experience offensive behavior, 65% endure it on social media. Bullying is also prevalent on
mobile phones (45%), online messaging (38%), online chat rooms (34%), and email (19%).
Shockingly, 20% of teens have sent sexually suggestive messages to people who didn't ask for
them.
Social media has become a platform for hostile behavior, and many parents worldwide believe
it's a major issue. Bullying even occurs in online games, affecting 53% of young adults who play
them. In the United States, 38% of internet users face trolling on social media daily.
The impact of offensive behavior on social media is taking a toll on people's mental health, and
in some extreme cases, it has led to suicide. Therefore, it's crucial to detect and eliminate such
behavior promptly and make online platforms safer.
To address this issue, researchers have conducted a survey and reviewed various articles related
to offensive behavior detection. They used databases like IEEE Explore, ACM, ScienceDirect,
Scopus, and Google Scholar to gather relevant information. They focused on articles related to
cyberbullying, hate speech, offensive content detection, toxic comment detection, profanity, and
aggressive language identification in online social networks.
The survey distinguishes itself by including a large number of research works (100) and
expanding the scope of the study. The paper summarizes the advantages, disadvantages, and
issues related to different approaches for identifying offensive behavior in social media. It also
discusses the factors that drive offenders to engage in such behavior and proposes preventive
measures and the cyber laws of various countries that enforce strict punishments.
The paper concludes by pointing out the remaining challenges and areas that need further
attention in identifying and combating online offensive behavior on social media.
In the next sections, the paper explains the different types of offensive behavior commonly
observed on social media, the approaches used for identifying such behavior, and recent research
literature in this field. It also addresses the factors behind engaging in offensive behavior,
preventive measures, and relevant laws in different countries. The paper concludes with a
summary of tasks that still need to be addressed.
The paper concludes by identifying challenges and areas that need further attention in dealing
with offensive behavior on social media.
1. The rest of the paper is organized as follows:
2. Section 2 talks about the different types of offensive behavior online.
3. Section 3 explains the approaches used to identify offensive behavior.
4. Section 4 reviews recent literature on recognizing offensive behavior.
5. Section 5 discusses the reasons why people engage in offensive behavior online.
6. Section 6 covers preventive measures and cyber laws from various countries to address
offensive behavior.
7. Finally, Section 7 concludes the paper and highlights tasks that still need to be addressed.

Types of offensive behaviour in social media

Offensive behaviour may take many forms; the following are some typical forms of offensive
behaviour that social media users commonly practice:
1. Abuse:
Online abuse occurs when someone uses technology to cause harm or distress to others. It can
happen on various platforms like social media, messaging apps, email, etc., and is more common
among teenagers in relationships.
2. Hate Speech:
This is when someone expresses online speech intended to attack a person or a group based on
their gender, disability, race, religion, sexual orientation, etc.
3. Misogyny:
Misogyny is expressing hate towards women, treating them as inferior to men.
4. Xenophobia:
It's an unreasonable expression of hate towards foreigners.
5. Troll:
A troll is someone who responds to online content or comments in a disturbing way just to stir up
trouble. They might create fake accounts for this purpose.
6. Cyber Aggression:
This refers to general online aggression between peers, without an intention to cause harm or
distress and no significant power imbalance between the parties.
7. Cyber Bullying:
Cyberbullying involves deliberately causing harm to someone using digital devices. It includes
sending, posting, or sharing mean, harmful, embarrassing, or threatening content on social
media, forums, or apps. An example is the story of Megan, a 13-year-old girl who faced severe
cyberbullying that tragically led to her taking her own life.
Approaches used to identify offensive behavior
In this section, the authors talk about different ways to detect offensive behavior online in social
media. They divide these approaches into four main types based on the features they focus on:
Content-based Approach: This method looks for offensive words and content in the messages
posted on social media. They use various techniques to analyze the text and identify offensive
language.
Sentiment and Emotion-based Approach: Here, they consider the emotions and sentiments
conveyed in the text, such as positive, negative, or neutral feelings. They combine this with
content-based features to better recognize offensive content, as sometimes sarcasm can be
mistaken for offensive language.
User or Profile-based Approach: This approach uses information from the user's profile, like age,
gender, race, number of followers, etc., along with their behavior on social media, to identify
offensive behavior.
Network-based Approach: In this method, they use the structure of social media networks and
how users are connected to each other to detect offensive content. They also use features like
graph embedding and neural networks to enhance the accuracy of detection.
The survey focuses on these four approaches and discusses their drawbacks. It also suggests
areas for improvement in detecting offensive behavior online more effectively.
Fig. 8 shows the classification of these approaches in a taxonomy of social media offensive
behavior identification methods.
Literature review
This section discusses recent research papers on identifying offensive behavior online, based on
the classification described in Section 4. The papers are reviewed, and their methodology,
contributions, pros, and cons are discussed.

Content-based Approach:
Chen et al. proposed a method called Lexical Syntactic Feature (LSF) approach to detect
offensive content and users in online social networks. They used traditional machine learning
methods with various features to improve prediction performance. However, this approach only
works for English and ignores other languages.

Hee et al. developed schemes to annotate cyberbullying and classify online posts into different
categories. The technique can be applied to multiple languages if annotated data is available.
However, it doesn't address the detection of implicit cyberbullying events.

Samghabadi et al. proposed a Natural Language Processing approach to detect abusive posts and
cyberbullying. The model uses various features to distinguish negative text but could have been
improved with emotional and user relationship network features.

Shylaja et al. used document embedding with supervised machine learning algorithms to detect
aggressive comments. The model efficiently identified aggressive comments using specific
techniques, but it could have been further optimized with additional learning techniques.

Dadvar and Eckert explored cyberbullying detection using Deep Learning (DL) models and
compared their performance with traditional Machine Learning (ML) models. DL models with
transfer learning performed better. However, they overlooked incorporating user profile
information from social media.
Agrawal et al. analyzed cyberbullying on multiple topics across social media platforms and
applied transfer learning to detect it. Deep learning models outperformed traditional ML models,
but the dataset lacked bullying severity information, which could have improved the detection
model.

Huang et al. proposed a cyberbullying intervention application based on the CNN learning
model. The application could identify cyberbullying in real-time and offered early feedback to
users to revise their messages. Adding a social network relationship graph might further enhance
cyberbullying identification.

Factors that lead to online offensive behavior:

Mental Health Issues: Some people engaging in offensive behavior might be facing severe
mental health issues due to past bullying experiences.
Personality Features: Some individuals with a dark tetrad personality lack empathy and enjoy
bullying others to feel powerful.
Consequences of Endured Bullying: People who have been victims of bullying might exhibit
offensive behavior as a way to lash out.
Consequences of Conflicts or Breakups: After conflicts or breakups, some individuals seek
revenge and jealousy, leading them to harass others with offensive behavior online.
Boredom or the Desire for a New Persona: People who are bored or dissatisfied with their lives
might engage in offensive behavior to try out a new persona.
Loneliness or Isolation: Some individuals may feel lonely or ignored, leading them to vent their
rage through offensive behavior online.
Anonymity on the Internet: The anonymity the internet offers makes offensive behavior non-
confrontational, encouraging some people to post nasty things online.
Lack of Requirement for Popularity or Physical Dominance: Online offenders can target anyone,
regardless of their status in real life.
Easy Accessibility: Anyone with internet access can display offensive behavior towards others,
especially if they know the target personally.
Lack of Feedback from the Victim: Unlike offline bullying, online offenders don't see the direct
impact of their actions, allowing them to continue their behavior for longer.
Preventive Measures:
Openly Addressing the Issues: Encourage open discussions about bullying experiences to help
people cope with their frustrations and avoid exhibiting offensive behavior.
Educating About Cyber Laws: Educate people about the severity of cyberbullying as a crime and
the consequences they might face if caught.
Secure Electronic Devices: Keep electronic devices password-protected and avoid leaving them
unattended in public or unfamiliar places.
Utilize Privacy Settings: Make use of privacy settings on social media platforms to control who
can see your posts and personal information.
Think Before Posting: Be cautious and think carefully before posting sensitive information or
photos online, as once it's posted, it may be difficult to completely erase.
Overall, by understanding the factors driving offensive behavior and implementing preventive
measures, we can create a safer online environment and combat online offensive behavior
effectively.
Future research directions to combat online offensive behavior:
Automated Annotation: Develop a model to automatically label offensive content data to avoid
bias and make the process more objective.
Writing Style Analysis: Explore the unique writing styles of individuals and use them, along
with different word embedding techniques, to improve offensive content detection.
Multimedia Offensive Content: Focus on efficiently detecting offensive videos, audio, gifs, and
pictures, as they are widely used on social media.
Identifying the Source: Determine the source of offensive content to understand and prevent
bullying episodes more effectively.
Real-Time Detection: Develop a model that can identify offensive content in real-time and block
it immediately.
Generalized Model: Build a generic model to recognize offensive content in various forms across
different social media platforms.
Severity Assessment: Enhance detection algorithms to determine the seriousness of
cyberbullying for appropriate interventions.
Non-Textual Content Datasets: Develop datasets containing offensive images, audios, and videos
to enable research in non-textual content detection.
Regional Language Detection: Create datasets and algorithms to identify offensive content in
regional languages used on social media.
Psychological Aspects: Collaborate with psychologists and sociologists to incorporate
psychological aspects of bullies into detection models.
Temporal Aspects: Integrate temporal aspects with network-based features to enhance the
efficiency of detecting online bullying.
Conclusion
In conclusion, detecting and eliminating online offensive behavior is crucial to prevent harm.
The paper discussed the impact of offensive behavior on social media, various types of offensive
behavior, and research studies focusing on detection techniques. Preventive measures, legal
aspects, and future research directions were also highlighted.