Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:138

https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-024-01303-z

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Exploring the prevalence of homophily among classes of hate speech

Seema Nagar1 · Kalyani Naik2 · Ferdous Ahmed Barbhuiya1 · Kuntal Dey1

Received: 28 June 2024 / Accepted: 8 July 2024

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature 2024

Abstract
In this paper, we investigate the phenomenon of homophily in hate speech generation on Twitter, aiming to deepen our
understanding of online hate dynamics. Given the vast amount of information available on Twitter, computing familiarity
and similarity–essential for discovering homophily–poses significant challenges. To address this, we introduce novel meas-
ures for computing familiarity and similarity on the platform. Hate speech on social media can manifest in various forms,
including hate against gender, race, ethnicity, politics, and nationalism. Consequently, we propose methods to detect multiple
forms of hate speech. Utilizing an empirical dataset from Twitter, we demonstrate the prevalence of homophily and explore
its variations across different categories of hate speech.

Keywords Hate speech detection · Graph convolutional network · Social context

1 Introduction Consequently, the imperative to investigate hate speech

The emergence of social media platforms has ushered in
unparalleled avenues for communication and the exchange
of information. User-generated content on these platforms
is imbued with a spectrum of emotions, ranging from irony
and puns to expressions of hate. Amidst this diverse array
of emotions, these platforms have also transformed into
fertile grounds for the propagation of hate speech, carry-
ing profound and adverse implications for both individu-
als and societies at large. The proliferation of hate speech
across social media can inflict psychological distress, fuel
instances of harassment, promote discrimination, and even
incite acts of violence (Matamoros-Fernández et al. 2019).
* Seema Nagar
nagar.seema@gmail.com
Kalyani Naik
kalyaninaik007@gmail.com
Ferdous Ahmed Barbhuiya
ferdous@iiitg.ac.in
Kuntal Dey
u2ckuntal@gmail.com
1
Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute
of Information Technology Guwahati, Bongora, Guwahati,
Assam 781015, India
2
Computer Science, SVKM’s NMIMS MPSTME, Mumbai,
Maharashtra 400056, India
within the realm of social media has intensified, prompting
the need for the formulation of effective strategies to detect
and combat its prevalence.
Homophily on social networks was first proposed by
McPherson et al. (2001), using the assortative mixing
hypothesis. Homophily is defined as the tendency of like-
minded (similar) people to connect with/befriend (famil-
iar) each other. A key observation about homophily is that
it structures the ego networks of individuals and impacts
their communication behaviour. Therefore, many works
have studied the role of homophily in information diffu-
sion, dissemination, topic or community formation and life
cycle (Aral et al. 2009; De Choudhury et al. 2010; Halber-
stam and Knight 2016; Starbird and Palen 2012; Dey et al.
2018; Paik et al. 2023). Very recently, Xu and Zhou (2020),
utilized hashtag-based homophily for re-marketing, a practi-
cal application with immense effect.
The importance of homophily in information diffusion
motivated us to assess the presence of it in hate speech gen-
eration empirically. By understanding the tendencies towards
homophily within hateful discourse, we can gain insights
into the nature and extent of these ideologies, potentially
enabling the development of more effective interventions
and countermeasures. Works such as Ribeiro et al. (2017),
Mathew et al. (2019) study the positional aspect of hateful
users in the social network. However, the literature has not
explored homophily, a crucial aspect. We further investigate

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the strength of the homophilic phenomenon for different
types of hate such as, hate against gender, race and nation.
Familiarity and similarity are the two essential factors in
homophily. Familiarity captures the phenomenon of users
becoming friends with (or, following) other users. The fea-
ture to become friends or follow other users is a signal of
familiarity. While the content produced, profile information
or any other meta-data information present are signals for
similarity computation.
Similarity computation is not straightforward due to the
myriad of information available about users on social media
platforms. We believe the similarity between a pair of users
should take multiple aspects of the content generated in
addition to meta-data for the profiles. The multiple aspects
we explore in this paper are semantic, syntactic, stylometric
and topical. We empirically investigate homophily along
with the multiple aspects of hate speech generation. We use
word embeddings to compute semantic features for a user.
The word embeddings are aggregated in a time-decaying
manner to get a complete semantic representation of the
user-generated content. We utilize the important features
needed in authorship attribution (Bhargava et al. 2013) and
some other features designed by us to derive syntactical and
stylometric features. Additionally, we also include readabil-
ity (Kincaid 1975) related features. Lastly, we unearth the
hidden thematic structure of a document along topics and
categories in two ways, (a) using latent topic modelling to
construct a topic affinity vector and (b) categories using
Empath (Fast et al. 2016) to construct category score vector.
The familiarity between pairs is another critical aspect of
homophily computing and is measured by how well users
know each other. Social media platforms use social network
graphs consisting of nodes and edges to capture familiarity.
Relationships can be directed or undirected depending on
whether mutual consent is required. Traditional familiarity
computations rely on explicit features such as edge exist-
ence or mutual friend count, but figuring out what to use for
familiarity computation is time-consuming and experimen-
tal (Dey et al. 2018). Graph embedding-based techniques,
such as deep learning-based graph neural networks (GNNs),
have gained significant attention for encoding nodes in a
vector latent space and aggregating feature information
from local neighbours via neural networks. Unlike previ-
ous graph embedding models, GNNs aggregate feature
information from the node’s local neighbours, enabling bet-
ter representation of the rich neighbourhood information
(Gao et al. 2018; Hamilton et al. 2017; Kipf and Welling
2016a; Liu et al. 2018; Schlichtkrull et al. 2018; Veličković
et al. 2017). We propose using graph convolution network
(GCN) based embedding called variation graph autoencod-
ers (VGAE) (Kipf and Welling 2016b) to capture familiar-
ity. The VGAE-based embedding has shown effectiveness in
various downstream tasks, and its application to capturing
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:138
familiarity between pairs can lead to improved performance
in tasks such as link prediction and recommendation.
Hate speech on social media can take on various types,
such as hate against gender, race, ethnicity, politics and
nationalism. Identifying these hateful classes is crucial in
mitigating the spread of hate speech on social media. Tra-
ditional methods, such as clustering-based unsupervised
approaches and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), have
been developed to detect different forms of hate. However,
these methods have been found to have limitations in deter-
mining the number of topics, interpreting topics, and captur-
ing context and temporal dynamics. To address these issues,
we propose two complementary automated techniques and
methods to detect various hateful forms in a tweet corpus.
The first approach involves using Task Aware Representa-
tion of Sentences (TARS) (Halder et al. 2020) based clas-
sification for few-shot learning to detect hateful forms, par-
ticularly in cases where corpora lack labels. This approach
enables the system to learn from a small set of labelled
examples, making it particularly useful for detecting new
and emerging forms of hate speech.
In the second approach, we use hashtags to detect hate-
ful forms. Hashtags have emerged as a powerful tool for
categorizing tweets and associating them with specific top-
ics or events. Hashtags can provide valuable insights into
the underlying topics and events that drive hateful con-
tent. In our proposed automated technique, we first iden-
tify seed hashtags for each hateful form and then expand
these hashtags to include other relevant hashtags. We use
the expanded hashtags to identify the hateful forms label
for each tweet.
These two methods complement each other and can pro-
vide more comprehensive coverage of detecting various
forms of hate speech. The few-shot learning approach using
Task Aware Representation of Sentences (TARS) is useful
when labelled data is scarce or unavailable. It can effectively
learn from a small set of labelled examples and adapt to
new and emerging forms of hate speech. This approach can
be particularly helpful in identifying previously unknown
or unclassified forms of hate speech. On the other hand,
the hashtag-based approach can provide valuable insights
into the underlying topics and events that drive hateful con-
tent. By identifying the hashtags associated with different
forms of hate speech, we can understand the motivations
and ideologies behind hate speech. Moreover, combining
these two approaches can provide a more comprehensive
and accurate identification of hateful forms. The few-shot
learning approach can identify new and emerging forms of
hate speech, while the hashtag-based approach can provide
insights into the underlying motivations and topics driving
the hate speech. Overall, proposing two different approaches
for detecting hateful forms provides a more flexible and
comprehensive approach to detecting hate speech on social
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:138
Fig. 1  Overall architecture diagram: an illustration of the intercon-
nected components and their relationships
media. We plan to investigate the ensemble of these two
methods in future work.
In summary, we make the following contributions:
• We propose a novel way to compute familiarity using a
graph embedding technique
• We explore a slew of similarity features to capture mul-
tiple aspects of user-generated content
• We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of the
newly proposed metrics in establishing familiarity and
similarity against the existing metrics, using homophily
as the benchmark of comparison
• We put forward an automated approach to identify
hashtags associated with various hateful forms.
• We do an in-depth analysis of variations in homophily
strength across different hateful forms
Our system is composed of three interrelated modules,
namely the similarity computation module, the familiarity
computation module, and the hateful forms detection mod-
ule, as depicted in Fig. 1. These modules work together to
achieve the overall goal of the system. The similarity compu-
tation module further comprises defining metrics capable of
capturing multiple facets of similarity aspects. The familiar-
ity computation module aims to measure the level of famili-
arity between two users based on their previous interactions
and communication history on the platform. This module is
crucial in capturing the relationship dynamics between users
and understanding their behavioural patterns.
Page 3 of 16 138
Finally, the hateful forms detection module uses natural
language processing techniques to analyze the text content
and detect hateful speech. This module helps to identify and
categorize different types of hate speech, providing a com-
prehensive understanding of the nature and extent of hate
speech in social media.
The three modules work together to completely under-
stand homophily in hate speech. The combination of the
similarity and familiarity computation modules assists in
defining similarity and familiarity between users, while the
hateful forms detection module assists in identifying the type
of hate speech.
Defining similarities between users on social media plat-
forms is a complex task due to the vast amount of informa-
tion produced by each individual. The sheer volume of data
makes it challenging to determine the similarity between
two users accurately. A user can have the following types of
information available on social media platforms:
• Profile information comprising of demographics, age,
gender, date of birth, time of joining, interests, and com-
munities of interest among many others. The profile
information is usually static and less frequently updated.
• User-generated content, the posts, reactions, and com-
ments a user is involved in. The user-generated content
is full of rich information about the user. We can use it
to infer the user’s interests, writing style, frequency of
posting, and readability-related parameters to name a few
for writing-related constructs
The task of defining similarity between two users is a chal-
lenging one, given the wide range of signals available that
can be used as indicators. This complexity suggests that
similarity is a multifaceted and fascinating phenomenon,
with many dimensions. Consequently, to define similarity
between users, we must consider the multiple dimensions
and signals available and inferred. In the following sections,
we elaborate on the various metrics used to infer similarity.
Similarly, the readily available familiarity metrics fail
to capture the iterative nature of familiarity (familiarity
between two users should factor in the neighbourhood of
both users) between a pair of users. Graph representation
derived using a deep neural network has become popular
to learn vectorized node embeddings. These learnt node
embedding can then facilitate a multitude of downstream
graph mining tasks. We use variational graph autoencoder
(VGAE) based embeddings of users in the social network to
compute familiarity. VGAE-based embeddings are capable
of capturing the iterative nature of node embedding (a node’s
embedding is a function of its neighbours’ embeddings).
Using VGAE, we get a vector representation of a node (user)
in the social network. And then use various distance-based
138 Page 4 of 16 Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:138

metrics such as Cosine, Euclidean, and Manhattan distance

to compute familiarity between a pair of users.
We develop the Hateful Forms Detection Module to cate-
gorize tweets into hateful forms. To achieve this, we propose
two complementary techniques that make use of Task-aware
representation of sentences (TARS) and Hashtag encoding.
These methods are flexible and can be easily extended to
incorporate additional categories for text classification. In
the following sections, we provide a comprehensive descrip-
tion of the modules that are utilized in the Hateful Forms
Detection Module.

2 A novel familiarity computation approach

We aim to capture a user’s unified view from a position in
their social network. The existing familiarity metrics such
as, whether an edge exists or not, mutual friends count, or if
users are part of the same community or not, fail to incor-
porate the unified familiarity for a pair of users. We propose
to use a graph encoder, to encode a user’s position and then
use these encoding vectors to compute familiarity between
two users.
2.1 Graph encoder
The graph encoder is designed to capture a user’s latent posi-
tion within a social network. It accepts two inputs, which
include the identity matrix and the adjacency matrix rep-
resenting social connectivity. The encoder is trained in an
unsupervised fashion to learn a vector representation of the
input graph. The method used for the graph encoder is a
well-known technique referred to as Variational Graph Auto-
Encoder (VGAE) (Kipf and Welling 2016b). The VGAE 2
is composed of two components: an encoder to encode the
graph and a decoder to decode the graph. The encoder con-
sists of two layers of graph convolutional layers that con-
vert the graph into a lower-dimensional latent representation
referred to as Z. Meanwhile, the decoder optimizes the cross-
entropy loss between the original and reconstructed adja-
cency matrix and the KL divergence between the approxi-
mate and the true posterior (Fig. 2).
2.1.1 Variational graph auto encoder (VGAE)
Fig. 2  Variational graph auto encoder: a model for representing graph
structures with latent variables
distribution. The decoder in the VGAE framework is rep-
resented as p𝜃 (A ∣ Z) , a variational approximation that
transforms the embedding Z into an output estimate  .
Encoder or inferencing moxdel
The encoder comprises two graph convolutional layers.
It transforms the social network graph into a latent repre-
sentation using a convolutional network. The first layer
inputs the adjacency matrix A and the identity matrix, and
outputs the latent variable Z. This first GCN layer pro-
duces a lower-dimensional feature matrix X̄ , as expressed
in Eq. 1. The formula uses à = D−1∕2 AD−1∕2 , which is a
symmetrically normalized adjacency matrix. The second
GCN layer generates the mean 𝜇 and log of the square of
the standard deviation 𝜎 2 , as shown in Eqs. 2 and 3.
X̄ = GCN(X, A) = ReLU(AXW
̃ 0) (1)
𝜇 = GCN𝜇 (X, A) = Ã XW
̄ 1 (2)
log𝜎 2 = GCN𝜎 (X, A) = Ã XW
̄ 1 (3)
The two layers of GCN can be combined as shown in Eq. 4
and Z can be calculated using Eq. 5, where 𝜖 ∈ N(0, 1) ,
wherein N represents a Gaussian (normal) distribution.
̃
GCN(X, A) = A.ReLu( ̃ (4)
AXW 0 )W1

The VGAE encoder is represented by q𝜙 (Z ∣ X, A) , which

transforms a data point X into a distribution. The dis-
Z =𝜇+𝜎 ∗𝜖 (5)
tribution is modelled as a multivariate Gaussian and is In summary, the encoder can be written as shown in Eq. 6.
characterized by the predicted means and standard devia-
tions. The lower-dimensional representation, known as the
embedding Z, is obtained by sampling from this Gaussian
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:138 Page 5 of 16 138

q(zi X, A) = N(zi _ −�� 𝜇i , diag(𝜎i2 )) (6) 3 Defining novel metrics for similarity
computation
Decoder
The decoder, as part of the generative model, is repre- We propose that the calculation of similarity on social
sented by the inner product of the latent variable Z and its media platforms should consider various aspects of a
transpose Z T . The result of this operation, specified in Eq. 8, user, beyond just direct textual similarity. These aspects
is then reconstructed as the adjacency matrix  as specified could include a user’s profile information, writing-related
in Eq. 7. The logistic sigmoid function 𝜎() is also utilized in nuances such as stylometry, the content generated, and
this process. To summarize, the decoder can be represented topics discussed, among others. Using a Twitter dataset,
mathematically as given in Eq. 8. we demonstrate that homophily exists in the generation of
hate speech along all aspects considered in the similarity
 = 𝜎(ZZ T ) (7) computation. Therefore, highlighting the importance of
considering multiple aspects of a user when evaluating
p(Aij = 1‖zi , zj ) = 𝜎(zTi zj ). (8) similarity, as it offers a more comprehensive understand-
ing of the dynamics of hate speech and could lead to an
Loss in VGAE improvement in detection accuracy.
The loss function for the Variational Graph Autoencoder
(VGAE) is composed of two parts. The first part, referred 3.1 Features for similarity computation
to as the variational lower bound, evaluates the accuracy of
the network’s reconstruction of the data and is modelled as We propose various features to capture the nuances of
the binary cross-entropy between the input and output. The the content generated by a user on online social media
second part, called KL-divergence, measures the similar- platforms. The features are capable of capturing similar-
ity between q(Z ∣ X, A) and p(Z) = N(0, 1). KL-divergence ity along semantic, syntactic, stylometric, and topical
compares the approximation q(Z ∣ X, A) to the true posterior dimensions.
p(Z). The loss function is described in Eq. 9. Algorithm 1  Computing Semantic Features fora User
L = Eq(Z‖X,A [logp(A‖Z)] − KL[q(Z‖X, A)��p(Z)] (9)
Input: User u, Set of Posts P = {p1 , p2 , ..., pM }
with timestamps
2.2 Computing familiarity Output: Semantic Embedding S (u) of the user
1: Compute time span of P as T
The concept of familiarity between a pair of users is deter- 2: Divide T into time-windows T =
mined by calculating the distance between them in the {tn , tn−1 , tn−2 , ..., t1 } of size one week where
graph embedding space. The inverse relationship between
n are the total number of weeks and t1 is the
distance and familiarity is assumed, where lower distances
most recent week
correspond to higher levels of familiarity. To compute the
3: for each time window t in T do
familiarity, existing distance measures are employed, includ-
4: Compute weight(tk ) = 1/k
ing Cosine distance, Manhattan distance, and Euclidean dis-
5: end for
tance. The metrics between two users, u1 and u2, are formally
6: for each post p in P do
defined in Eqs. 10 to 12.
Let ū1 and ū2 represent graph embedding of the users u1 7: for each word w in p do
and u2 respectively. 8: Compute word embedding E (w) using
Glove
(ū1 ⋅ (ū2 ) 9: Compute tweet embedding E (p) as
Cosine Similiarity(u1, u2) = (10)
||ū1 || ⋅ ||ū2 || mean of word embeddings E (w)
10: end for
� n �1∕p 11: Find weight W (p) for p using weight for
�
Manhattan Distance(u1, u2) = ‖xi − yi ‖p
(11) the time windows it falls in
i=1 12: end for
13: Compute user semantic embedding S (u)
√ 
√ n 14: S (u) = i E (pi ) ∗ W (p)/P
√∑
Euclidean Distance(u1, u2) = √ (xi − yi )2 (12)
i=1
138 Page 6 of 16
3.1.1 Semantic features
In our approach, user-generated content is represented
through the use of word embeddings, where each post
is transformed into a vector representation. The seman-
tic embedding of a user is obtained by aggregating the
post embeddings using a weighted mean pooling method.
This aggregation methodology is inspired by the work in
Rajadesingan et al. (2015), where the authors emphasize
the significance of incorporating the temporal aspect in
user-generated content. Our implementation of time-
decaying aggregation accounts for two crucial factors:
the activity level of the user and the relevance of recent
posts compared to older ones. The tweets are divided into
time buckets of one week and assigned weights inversely
proportional to their temporal position. The details
of the time-decay-based aggregation are described in
Algorithm 1."
3.1.2 Syntactic features
The syntactic features of the user’s tweets play an important
role in understanding the user’s writing style and language
use. In order to capture this information, we use the impor-
tant features proposed in the study of Rajadesingan et al.
(2015) and some additional features designed by us. These
features are used to compute a syntactical feature vector to
represent the user. The features include the number of capi-
tal words, question marks, exclamations, numbers, URLs,
user mentions, hashtags, and emojis present in a tweet. To
obtain the syntactic feature vector for a user, these features
are calculated for each tweet made by the user and then aver-
aged over all the tweets. This provides a comprehensive
understanding of the user’s language use and writing style.
The resulting feature vector can be used as input for further
analysis and modelling tasks.
3.2 Stylometric and readability features
In the field of authorship attribution, there have been several
important features proposed to detect the author of a piece of
content. In our work, we incorporate these features in cap-
turing the writing style of a user. Specifically, we adopt fea-
tures proposed in Bhargava et al. (2013) and Rajadesingan
et al. (2015). These features include the number of words
per tweet, the number of sentences per tweet, the number of
elongated words per tweet, the number of repeated words per
tweet, and the word length distribution. The latter is a vector
of length 19, where each element represents the frequency of
words of a particular length. Additionally, we compute the
mean, median, and standard deviation of the word length
distribution.
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:138
di = ∪(∀pj ∈P) pj (13)
Moreover, to further understand the readability of a user’s
writing style, we compute the Flesch–Kincaid Reading Ease
score for each user. To do this, we first create a document
d for each user u by combining all the tweets, as described
in Eq. 13. We then use the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease
formula (Kincaid 1975) to compute the readability score for
each user. This helps us capture the ease of understanding of
a user’s writing style, which can provide useful information
in understanding the dynamics of hate speech.
3.2.1 Topical features
In order to compute the topic features, we utilize two meth-
ods. The first method involves performing topic modelling
on the user-generated content. The second method involves
using the methodology proposed in Fast et al. (2016) to con-
struct the Empath category scores vector.
For the first method, we employ latent topic modelling
techniques called Latent Dirichlet Allocation. The result of
the topic modelling is the latent affinity of each user to vari-
ous topics, which is then used to construct a topic vector for
each user. For the second method, we utilize the Empath
library (Fast et al. 2016) to construct the Empath category
scores vector. The Empath library allows for the computa-
tion of a fixed-length vector of category scores that represent
a text document. The categories include emotions, objects,
events, and more, and capture the content and style of a
user’s writing. The result of this method is a topic vector that
captures the diverse topics discussed by a user.
4 Hateful forms detection using TARS
We propose to use Task-aware representation of sentences
(TARS) to detect hateful forms. TARS is introduced by
Halder et al. (2020) as a simple and effective method for
few-shot and even zero-shot transfer learning for text clas-
sification. It means we can classify text without (m)any
training examples. The pre-trained TARS model can be
used as-is but providing a handful of training examples
improves its performance. TARS pre-trained model can
easily be extended to learn new classes remarkably well by
using only a handful of training samples. We supply a few
training samples to fine-tune TARS for each hateful form.
The core idea behind TARS is that it reformulates the
text classification problem as a "query". In this query, the
transformer receives both a sentence and a potential class
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:138
label, and it predicts whether or not the label holds. The
cross-attention mechanism in the transformer learns to
combine the representation of the text and the label, and
this allows for the transfer of the full model. The advantage
of TARS over previous models is that it preserves both the
decoder layer and the semantic information present in the
natural language task class labels. This results in the same
decoder being used across arbitrary tasks and the informa-
tion provided by the class label being interpreted by the
transformer model. Furthermore, TARS has the capability
to return predictions even for classes that have no training
data. This is possible because the textual label of the new
class is prepended to the text and the result of the "True/
False" decoder is evaluated.
4.1 Using TARS for detecting hateful classes
In order to detect hateful forms in tweets, we first define
the set of all hateful forms of interest, denoted as H. The
corpus of tweets under consideration is denoted as C. For
each hateful form h in H, we create a lexicon hl that repre-
sents the language patterns associated with that particular
hateful form. A limited number of tweets denoted as K, are
selected from the corpus C and annotated using the lexicon
hl . If a tweet text contains elements from the lexicon hl , it
is labelled with the corresponding hateful form hl.
To ensure the accuracy of the annotation process, we
conduct a manual verification process on the labelled
tweets and discard any tweets that were wrongly labelled.
The final annotated tweets for the hateful class h are
denoted as Kh . Along with the annotated hateful tweets,
we also manually annotate a set of N tweets as normal
tweets (not hateful) from the corpus C.
To build a multi-class classifier for detecting hateful
forms in tweets, we use a transfer learning approach by
leveraging the pre-trained TARS model as a base model.
We follow the methodology outlined in the research
paper (Halder et al. 2020) to extend the pre-trained model
with the additional hateful classes H, along with one more
class for normal tweets. The annotated corpus Kh for each
hateful class h and the set of N normal tweets serve as the
training data for fine-tuning the TARS pre-trained model.
5 Hateful forms detection using hashtags
Our approach for the automated detection of hashtags used
for various hateful forms consists of three main steps:
Manual identification of hateful hashtags We first
manually identify the hashtags that are frequently used
in tweets containing hateful speech. To achieve this, we
Page 7 of 16 138
analyze a set of tweets that are labelled as hateful and
identify the hashtags that are commonly used in these
tweets.
Manual grouping of the hashtags into various hateful
forms We then group the identified hashtags into the five
different categories based on the hateful forms they rep-
resent, such as hate against race, sex, and communities.
Automated expansion of hashtags for individual hateful
form Finally, we employ automated expansion techniques
to identify other hashtags related to each hateful form.
5.1 Automated expansion of hashtags for hateful
form
In this section, we present an automated technique for
expanding hashtags for individual hateful forms using
hashtag encoding. We aim to capture the context and
semantics of hashtags based on the tweets they are used
in. To achieve this, tweets are treated as documents, and
a corpus is created based on the text in the tweets. Each
tweet document in the corpus is then encoded using a neu-
ral network-based encoder. Polarity is assigned to each
hashtag based on the polarity of the tweets in which it is
present. A hashtag is assigned negative polarity if at least
FT fraction of the tweets are negative.
The negative polarity hashtags are then encoded using
the tweets in which they are present. Only tweets with neg-
ative polarity are used to encode the hashtag. The encoding
of each hashtag is the mean encoding of the documents,
classified as negative sentiment, in which it appears. By
using the mean encoding, the context and meaning of the
hashtag can be captured based on the tweets in which it
is used. Next, the hashtags are expanded for each manu-
ally identified group (cluster) based on their similarity in
the hashtag space. The hashtag space captures the unique
characteristics of each hashtag and its specific usage pat-
terns in the context of hate speech on social media. To
expand each cluster of hashtags, a clustering algorithm is
employed, specifically, K-means with different centroid
update strategies, including no update, mean update and
medoid update.
Leveraging this approach enables the identification of
other hashtags related to each hateful form, even if they
were not part of the original manually identified group.
This leads to a more comprehensive understanding of the
nuances and variations of hate speech on social media,
which is crucial for developing effective detection and
mitigation strategies. Furthermore, this approach can
provide valuable insights into the underlying topics and
motivations driving the hateful content in each form. The
approach can be summarized as follows:
138 Page 8 of 16
Algorithm 2  Identification of Hateful Hashtags
1: Step 1: Manual identification of hateful hash-
tags
2: Analyze a set of tweets labelled as hateful and
identify commonly used hashtags
3: Step 2: Manual grouping of hashtags into
different categories
4: Group the identified hashtags into five cate-
gories based on the hateful forms they repre-
sent
5: Step 3: Automated expansion of hashtags
6: Compute tweet embeddings
7: Detect the polarity of each tweet
8: Assign polarity to each hashtag based on the
polarity of tweets it is present in
9: Encode negative polarity hashtags using
tweets of negative polarity
10: Expand hashtags for each individual hateful
form based on similarity in the hashtag space
using a clustering algorithm
6 Dataset preparation
In this section, we describe the dataset used and its modifica-
tions for evaluating the proposed research questions.
6.1 Dataset details
We use the hate speech dataset provided by Ribeiro et al.
(2017). This dataset contains 200 most recent tweets of
100, 386 users, totalling around 19M tweets. It also contains
a retweet-induced graph of the users. The retweet-induced
graph is a directed graph G = (V, E) where each node u ∈ V
represents a user in Twitter, and each edge (u1, u2) ∈ E rep-
resents that the user u1 has retweeted user u2. Furthermore,
every tweet is categorized as an original tweet, retweet, or
quote (retweet with a comment). Out of the 100, 386 users,
labels (hateful or normal) are available for 4, 972 users, out
of which 544 users are labelled as hateful and the rest as
normal. We perform pre-processing techniques suitable for
tweets, including removing links, converting emoticons to
text, and removing non-ASCII characters."
6.2 Dataset labelling at binary label (hateful or not)
The dataset used in this study lacks labels for tweet content,
necessitating manual annotation of tweets as either hateful
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:138
or not. However, annotating 19M tweets is a costly and time-
consuming process, so only a subset of tweets is annotated.
Accurate annotations are vital for uncovering homophily in
hate speech on social media platforms. Thus, we designed
the annotation process, in two phases:
1. Phase 1 Selection of the initial set of users and their
tweets for annotation.
2. Phase 2 Manual annotation of the tweets selected in
Phase 1.
Phase 1: user and tweet selection
To select the most suitable tweets for annotation, we care-
fully selected a subset of users, including the 544 hateful
users and another approximately 20, 000 users based on their
degree in the retweet network. All tweets from these users
were considered for manual annotation. Users and tweets
were further filtered based on the following criteria:
• Only users who posted in English were selected.
• Only tweets with a length greater than 10 characters were
selected to ensure proper sentence structure.
• The number of tweets per user was capped at 10, result-
ing in approximately 10 tweets per user with a length of
at least 10 characters.
This phase yielded a total of 30, 720 tweets to be annotated.
The filtered retweet network had 771, 401 edges and 18, 642
nodes. This systematic approach to tweet selection helped to
ensure the accuracy and reliability of the annotations, which
are crucial in uncovering homophily in hate speech on social
media platforms.
Phase 2: annotation
In Phase 2, the annotation process was carried out system-
atically and thoroughly to ensure high-quality results. Three
annotators with undergraduate degrees manually annotated
each tweet. The annotators were provided with the following
definition of hate speech: "Any speech that is intended to
degrade, intimidate, or incite violence or prejudicial action
against a particular person or group of people based on their
race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation,
gender identity, or other characteristics." The annotators
were instructed to annotate only the text of the tweets, with-
out considering any accompanying media or user informa-
tion. A binary label was used to indicate whether a tweet
was classified as hateful or not. In total, 27.5% of annotated
tweets were classified as hateful. To ensure the quality of
the annotation, we calculated the inter-annotator agreement
using Cohen’s kappa coefficient, which measures the level
of agreement between two annotators beyond chance. The
kappa coefficient for our annotation task was 0.87, indicating
a high level of agreement between the two annotators. Any
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:138
Table 1  The number of labelled samples and a few seed hashtags for
each type of hate speech
Form Number of Hashtags
Samples
Communalism 29 #jihadi, #islamic, #terrorist
Homophobia 55 #gay, #dyke, #fag
Racism 49 #nigga, #nigger, #paki
Sexism 142 #cunt, #bitch, #pussy
Xenophobia 79 #nomorenazis, #wolf2, #illegalaliens
discrepancies in annotation were resolved by discussing and
reviewing the tweets until a consensus was reached.
6.3 Dataset labelling at the hateful forms level
We aim to detect the five most common distinct forms of
hate speech, namely racism, sexism, communalism, xeno-
phobia, and homophobia Davidson et al. (2017). To achieve
this, we leverage a few-shot learning approach called TARS
Halder et al. (2020) and hashtags.
To enable few-shot learning for TARS, we manually
annotate a small number of samples for each hateful form.
We select a maximum of ten tweets per user from the 544
hateful users previously identified, resulting in a total of
5,343 tweets to be annotated. To facilitate annotation, we
create a comprehensive lexicon of words commonly asso-
ciated with each of the five forms of hate, sourced from
an existing resource1 and augmented with additional terms
manually extracted from tweets tagged with hashtags with
hateful connotations.
Manual inspection of the annotated tweets reveals that
99% of them correspond to the specified hate categories,
demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. This vali-
dates our method’s potential to accurately label hateful
tweets and provide a reliable dataset for future research. We
obtain a set of 354 tweets that have been rigorously verified
to contain hate speech, as presented in Table 1.
Based on the labelled tweets, we proceed to identify
initial hashtags for each type of hate speech. This involves
extracting all the hashtags used in the tweets related to each
form of hate speech. Furthermore, we conduct a thorough
manual inspection to examine the co-occurring hashtags of
these initial hashtags, with the aim of constructing a com-
prehensive list of initial seeds for each form of hate speech.
Table 1 shows a few of the seed hashtags for the hateful
forms. In both approaches outlined in this paper, we detect
hateful forms on the entire tweet corpus.
1
https://​www.​front​gatem​edia.​com/a-​list-​of-​723-​bad-​words-​to-​black​
list-​ and-​how-​to-​use-​faceb​ooks-​moder​ation-​tool/
Page 9 of 16 138
7 Experiments
7.1 Experiments overview
The purpose of the experiments is to investigate the follow-
ing research questions (RQs) related to hateful speech and
homophily:
1. RQ1 To what extent do individuals who generate hateful
content exhibit homophily?
2. RQ2 How does the newly proposed familiarity metric
compare to existing metrics in effectively identifying
homophily patterns among generators of hateful speech?
3. RQ3 Do patterns of homophily vary across different
types of similarity aspects?
4. RQ4 How effective is our proposed TARS-based
approach in detecting different types of hateful forms?
5. RQ5 To what extent are the manually identified seed
hashtags for each hateful form effective, and how does
the proposed hashtag encoding scheme perform?
6. RQ6 How well does our hashtag expansion approach
perform in detecting hateful forms?
7. RQ7 Are certain types of hateful speech more prone to
homophily among their generators?
7.2 Experiments settings
7.2.1 Parameter setting for familiarity computation
The implementation of Variational Graph Auto-Encoder
(VGAE) is carried out using the source code provided by
the library PyTorch Geometric.2 The adjacency matrix is
constructed from the retweet graph, which is represented as
an undirected graph. The training of the VGAE model was
performed with a learning rate of 0.01, for 120 epochs, with
a batch size equal to the size of the entire graph. The Adam
optimizer was used during the training process. The trained
encoder portion of the VGAE was then utilized as the graph
encoder for further experimentation.
To determine the similarity between users, we utilized the
Universal Sentence Encoder (USE)3 to encode the tweets of
each user. The aim here is to evaluate the effectiveness of our
proposed familiarity computation model by comparing it to
the standard similarity computation techniques employed in
the state-of-the-art. In this study, we retained the use of USE
encoding for similarity features to ensure a fair comparison
between our proposed familiarity features and the existing
ones. To measure the similarity between users, we calculated
the cosine similarity between their respective documents.
Furthermore, we computed the familiarity between users
2
https://​github.​com/​rusty​1s/​pytor​ch_​geome​tric
3
https://​tfhub.​dev/​google/​unive​rsal-​sente​nce-​encod​er/4
 138 Page 10 of 16
using two traditional metrics, namely edge existence and
the number of mutual friends, as well as three metrics based
on the user vectors obtained from our graph encoder. These
metrics include cosine similarity, Euclidean distance, and
Manhattan distance. The calculation of familiarity computa-
tion is performed using the Scipy library.4
7.2.2 Parameter settings for similarity computation
As described in Sect. 3, we aim to capture the similarity
along semantic, syntactic, stylometric, and topical dimen-
sions. The semantic features are constructed by utilizing pre-
trained GloVe word embeddings, while the syntactic and
stylometric features are extracted based on the methodology
outlined in previous studies (Bhargava et al. 2013; Rajades-
ingan et al. 2015).
To derive topical features, two approaches are used,
namely latent topical features and Empath category scores.
Latent topical features are constructed by applying Latent
Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to the tweet corpus, which is
composed of all tweets from all users. Each user’s tweets are
concatenated to form a document, and LDA is implemented
using the MALLET software. The values of the hyperpa-
rameters 𝛼 and 𝛽 are set to 5.0 and 0.01, respectively. The
Empath category scores are computed using the empath-
client library, which calculates the category score vectors
for each user based on the tweet document by mapping the
words in the tweet document to predefined categories. These
scores represent the extent to which a user’s tweets belong
to different categories.
Computing the similarity metrics is a compute-intensive
task, and with the available hardware, computing the simi-
larity metrics for each user would not have been feasible
within a reasonable time frame. To address this issue, we
resort to picking a subset of users. The methodology used to
pick the subset of users does not compromise the generaliz-
ability of the approach. We run modularity optimization-
based community detection using the networkx library5 to
pick a subset of users on the retweet network. The two com-
munities picked have approximately equal numbers of edges,
around 1, 60, 000, with the number of users being 7, 679
and 3, 277, respectively. These two communities provide
a sufficient number of users and demonstrate a significant
variation in edge density between the two.
7.2.3 Parameter settings for hateful forms detection using
TARS
We train a TARS-based few-shot multi-class classification
model for the detection of hateful classes. We update an
4
https://​www.​scipy.​org/
5 6
https://​netwo​rkx.​org/
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:138
existing pre-trained TARS model to meet our requirements.
The samples for each class are split into 70% for training,
10% for validation, and 20% for testing. The pre-trained
model is updated using a learning rate of 0.02, a mini-batch
size of 1, and over 8 epochs. The trained classifier is then
utilized to infer the labels for the tweets in the corpus.
7.2.4 Parameter settings for hateful forms detection using
hashtags
We retain only those hashtags that occur at least 10 times in
the corpus of tweets. To detect the polarity of a tweet, we
use an existing sentiment classifier called twitter-roberta-
base-sentiment available in the Hugging Face library.6 We
perform filtering of tweets based on the confidence score
of the sentiment classification model. Specifically, we only
retain those tweets where the model is confident enough.
We experiment with different confidence scores ranging
from 0.7 to 0.9 with an increment step of 0.1. To classify
a hashtag as negative, we use the FT fraction of negative
tweets out of the total tweets in which the hashtag is present.
We vary FT from 0.1 to 0.5 with an increment step of 0.1.
We only retain those hashtags that have a negative senti-
ment. To encode the tweets, we use the Universal Sentence
Encoder (USE). In addition, we experiment with K-means
clustering with different centroid update strategies, including
no update, mean update, medoid update, and learning rate-
based gradient update. We use the sci-kit-learn library to
implement these techniques. We report on the experimental
outcomes of our study for a confidence score of 0.7 and a
negative tweet threshold of FT = 0.3 and K-means with cen-
troid update. This particular combination of parameters is
selected as it yields the best results in our analysis. In total,
we classify 2739 hashtags into five hateful forms.
To detect homophily at the hateful form level, we com-
pute the familiarity between two users using our proposed
approach. To compute the similarity between users, we use
the USE embeddings of their tweets.
7.3 Experimental results
To compute familiarity within a group of users, we begin
by standardizing the familiarity values for each pair against
the highest value present within that specific set. This nor-
malization approach facilitates meaningful comparisons
across a spectrum of familiarity metrics. Subsequently, we
calculate the average of all these normalized pair values,
resulting in the group’s mean familiarity value. The same
process is reiterated to derive the similarity value for the
group.
https://​huggi​ngface.​co/​cardi​ffnlp/​twitt​er-​rober​ta-​base-​senti​ment
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:138 Page 11 of 16 138

In the subsequent visualizations, we manipulate the

hatefulness of individual users and observe the resultant
shifts in homophily patterns. The hatefulness of a user
is quantified as the proportion of their tweets classified
as hateful (based on binary classification). For each des-
ignated fraction of hatefulness, we select users whose
hatefulness meets or exceeds the specified value. This
approach allows us to systematically examine the effects
of varying user hatefulness on homophily.
First, we establish using existing similarity and famili-
arity metrics that homophily exist among hateful users,
that is essentially the research questions RQ1. We analyze
the relationship between similarity and familiarity using
two different existing metrics of familiarity. Our analy-
sis involved varying the proportion of hateful tweets and
examining the homophily in the users fulfilling the pro-
portion. Our findings, presented in Fig. 3, indicate that as
the percentage of hateful tweets increases, the similarity
also increases.
RQ2 To rigorously assess the efficacy of our proposed
familiarity metrics, we kept the similarity metric con-
stant and varied the familiarity metrics independently. To
ensure the robustness and validity of our methodology, we
employ the Pearson correlation coefficient (r) as a meas-
ure of the relationship between familiarity and similarity.
The results revealed that the newly introduced familiarity
metric yielded a Pearson correlation coefficient (r = 0.6),
signifying a moderate positive relationship with similarity.
This performance outperformed the edge-based familiar-
ity metric, which exhibited an r-value of 0.5. Conversely,
the mutual friends-based familiarity metric demonstrated
a weaker positive relationship, with an r-value of 0.2. The
values of r for the Euclidean and Manhattan distance met-
Fig. 3  Variation in similarity and familiarity with increasing hateful-
rics were found to be less than 0.1, albeit greater than zero. ness
As such, we chose not to present these results and instead
used the cosine similarity as it performed better.
The results of our analysis in addressing RQ3 are pre- on social media platforms and that they can be effectively
sented in Fig. 4 for both communities. The figure dem- utilized to identify and track the spread of hateful content.
onstrates the relationship between cosine similarity, To address RQ4, we measure the accuracy of the model.
computed as a similarity measure, and familiarity for six Table 2 demonstrates the effectiveness of the model through
different similarity metrics. The x-axis of the figures rep- its impressive performance metrics across various hate cate-
resents the hatefulness of the users, which is quantified as gories. These results indicate that the single model approach
the percentage of hateful tweets they have produced. is capable of effectively distinguishing between different
The results of our analysis clearly indicate that as the forms of hate speech and is therefore a reliable solution for
hatefulness of the users increases, the similarity values for all inference on a larger corpus.
types of features also increase. This finding provides strong The aim of RQ5 is to assess the effectiveness of the manu-
evidence for the hypothesis that like-minded individuals tend ally identified seed hashtags for each hateful form and the
to congregate and form communities with similar ideologies proposed hashtag encoding scheme. This is a crucial aspect,
and views. Of particular interest is the observation that the as the accuracy of hashtag-based hate speech detection pri-
pattern of increasing similarity with increasing hatefulness marily depends on the quality of the initial seed hashtags and
is particularly pronounced in the topic-based similarity. This the ability of the encoding scheme to capture the semantic
result suggests that latent topics have the capacity to capture characteristics of the hashtags. To address this research ques-
the higher-level semantics of the discussions that take place tion, we first encode each seed hashtag using our proposed
 138 Page 12 of 16 Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:138

Fig. 4  Variation in similarity and familiarity with increasing hatefulness

Table 2  TARS classification results for detecting hateful forms: an

evaluation of the precision, recall and F1-score of the TARS frame-
work in identifying hateful ideologies in social media posts

Precision Recall F1-Score

Normal 0.9680 0.9837 0.9758

Sexist 0.8846 0.7931 0.8364
Xenophobia 0.9375 0.9375 0.9375
Racist 0.6667 0.8000 0.7273
Homophobia 1.0000 0.9091 0.9524
Communalism 0.7500 1.0000 0.8571
Fig. 5  Centroid of manual clusters of hashtags for each hateful form
Micro Avg 0.9289 0.9385 0.9337
Macro Avg 0.8678 0.9039 0.8811
Weighted Avg 0.9327 0.9385 0.9342
a two-dimensional space, allowing for a better understand-
ing of the distribution and relationship between the data
points. Our analysis indicates that the expanded clusters are
scheme and then compute the centroid of each hateful form well-separated, suggesting that our expansion scheme effec-
cluster. We subsequently plot the centroids using a t-SNE tively captures the nuanced differences between individual
plot. Figure 5 shows that the centroids are well-separated, instances of hateful language.
indicating that our manually identified hashtags can differ- To further assess the performance of the clustering algo-
entiate between individual hateful forms. Furthermore, the rithm, we calculated three metrics: Cohesiveness, Inter-clus-
proposed encoding scheme is capable of capturing the dis- ter distance, and Silhouette score. The Cohesiveness score
tinctive features of hateful forms. measures the degree to which data points within a cluster
To investigate RQ6, we employed a t-SNE plot to visual- are similar, while the Inter-cluster distance score measures
ize the expanded clusters, as presented in Figs. 6, 7, and 8 the distance between clusters. The Silhouette score measures
using different variations of clustering. The t-SNE plot pro- the quality of each cluster and the degree to which each data
vides a visual representation of the high-dimensional data in point belongs to its assigned cluster.
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:138
Fig. 6  Expanded clusters of hashtags for each hateful form
Fig. 7  Experiment 1: expanded clusters of hashtags for each hateful
form
Our results show that the Cohesiveness score is 0.647,
indicating that the data points within each cluster are similar.
The Inter-cluster distance is 0.246, suggesting that the clus-
ters are well-separated from each other. Finally, the Silhou-
ette score is 0.031, indicating that the clusters are of good
quality and that each data point is assigned to its appropri-
ate cluster. Overall, our analysis indicates that the cluster-
ing algorithm performed well in identifying and separating
instances of hateful language based on their unique features,
demonstrating the effectiveness of our expansion scheme
in capturing the nuances of different forms of hate speech.
Inference Using the Expanded Clusters
Utilizing the designated hashtags within each cluster, our
analysis proceeds to identify the individuals responsible for
creating content within each category of hate speech. Notably,
Page 13 of 16 138
Fig. 8  Experiment 2: expanded clusters of hashtags for each hateful
form
Table 3  The number of tweets and hashtags per month for each type
of hate speech.
Form T H U
Communalism 6115 2202 1289
Homophobia 10989 9946 5766
Racism 1615 1576 690
Sexism 14078 2424 7117
Xenophobia 42960 16542 11635
T refers to the total number of tweets, while H refers to the total num-
ber of hashtags and U refers to the total number of unique users
it is important to acknowledge that a single user may con-
tribute to multiple categories, given that their tweets might
encompass a spectrum of hateful forms. To accomplish this,
our approach involves the systematic identification of tweets
associated with each hateful form, followed by the attribution
of authors behind these tweets as active participants in gener-
ating content for the corresponding category of hate.
For every tweet, we extract the embedded hashtags and
subsequently ascertain their alignment with our predefined
categories of hate speech. In instances where a tweet con-
tains multiple associated hashtags, it can be affiliated with
multiple hate speech categories. Subsequent to this infer-
ence process, we present the resulting statistical insights in
Table 3.
To address RQ7, we compute the mean familiarity and
similarity of the users participating in each hateful form
using both approaches, TARS and Hashtag. To facilitate
comparison, we normalize both similarity and familiarity
values by dividing them by their respective maximum val-
ues. We plot the normalized metrics for each hateful form
in Fig. 9. The results reveal that individuals who engage in
racism and communalism hate speech tend to have stronger
connections with like-minded individuals, evidenced by
the higher values of familiarity and similarity observed
in these forms of hate speech. This finding highlights the
importance of understanding the dynamics of hate speech
138 Page 14 of 16
Fig. 9  Homophily in hateful classes detected using hashtags: an anal-
ysis of the prevalence of association among individuals with similar
hateful ideologies
on social media and the role of homophily in the persistence
and spread of these forms of hate speech.
Further, both approaches revealed that individuals
expressing hate against different behavioural traits such as
racism and communalism tend to strongly connect with each
other. This discovery further strengthens our confidence in
the efficacy of the proposed approaches to detect hateful
forms. Additionally, the results indicate that individuals
who engage in racist and communalism hate speech tend
to form stronger connections with others who hold similar
hateful beliefs. The clustering of like-minded individuals
can contribute to the persistence and spread of this type of
hate speech. The findings provide important insights that can
inform the development of targeted strategies for addressing
hate speech on social media. Furthermore, the observation
that different forms of hate speech may exhibit different lev-
els of homophilic behaviour emphasizes the importance of
detecting multiple forms of hate speech and understanding
their dynamics in the online environment.
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:138
8 Related work
The study of homophily, or the tendency for individuals to
associate and form connections with those who are similar
to themselves, has been a prominent topic in social network
research. Homophily in social networks was first proposed
by McPherson et al. (2001). This paper defines homophily
as exists between two users if they follow each other because
of shared common interests. Subsequently, De Choudhury
et al. (2010) establish that homophily plays a vital role in
information diffusion and dissemination on social networks.
Their work is built on a critical observation that homoph-
ily structures the ego networks of individuals and impacts
their communication behaviour. Another early work, Weng
et al. (2010) detects the existence of reciprocity that exists
on Twitter. They show that users sharing common interests
tend to follow each other, resulting in high reciprocity on
Twitter due to homophily. They use similarity and familiar-
ity together, to rank the users.
The role of homophily in information diffusion on social
networks is further strengthened by Halberstam and Knight
(2016), Aral et al. (2009), Starbird and Palen (2012). Specifi-
cally, Halberstam and Knight (2016) investigates homophily
in political information diffusion. They proved their hypoth-
eses on two groups, conservative and liberal, and concluded
that "with homophily, members of the majority group have
more network connections and are exposed to more infor-
mation than the minority group". Additionally, they also
show, that "with homophily and a tendency to produce like-
minded information, groups are disproportionately exposed
to like-minded information, and the information reaches
like-minded individuals more quickly than it reaches indi-
viduals of opposing ideologies." Another work by Aral et al.
(2009) demonstrates homophily in contagion for product
adoption on dynamic networks. They empirically establish
on the Yahoo IM (instant messenger) system that peer influ-
ence is not sufficient to explain contagion in product adop-
tion. They find that homophily is responsible for more than
half of the contagion. In addition, homophily has also been
studied in the context of sustaining online communities, as
demonstrated by Ducheneaut et al. (2007) who found that
homophily is an essential factor in the sustenance of online
gaming guilds. The role of familiarity and similarity has also
been explored in various studies, such as Ying et al. (2010)
which showed that semantic similarities in user trajectories
on mobile networks are a better indicator of user similarity
than traditional trajectory similarity measures. Thus, homo-
phily has been very well studied in the literature and is very
important to explain many social phenomena happening in
the virtual world.
Many papers have jointly studied familiarity and simi-
larity for modelling solutions on Twitter. Afrasiabi et al.
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:138
Afrasiabi Rad and Benyoucef (2014) study communities
formed over friendships on the YouTube social network.
They observe that communities are formed from similar
users on YouTube; however, they do not find large simi-
larity values between friends in YouTube communities.
Recently, topical homophily was proposed by Dey et al.
(2018), where they show that homophily is the driving fac-
tor in the emergence of topics and their life cycle. While
there has been a wealth of literature studying homophily and
its role in various social phenomena, there has been limited
research addressing the issue of homophily in hate speech
and different forms of hate speech. Our study fills this gap
by exploring the homophilic behaviour of individuals who
engage in different forms of hateful speech, such as racism,
communalism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia.
9 Conclusion
In conclusion, this research has shown that homophily is
exhibited by users who produce hateful content on social
media platforms. Furthermore, the results indicate that
homophily is more pronounced for certain forms of hate
speech, such as racism and communalism. This observation
is important as it suggests that individuals who engage in
racist and communalism hate speech tend to have stronger
connections with like-minded individuals, which may con-
tribute to the persistence and spread of this type of hate
speech. In addition to providing insight into the dynamics of
hate speech, this research also introduces metrics for meas-
uring familiarity and similarity in the context of social media
platforms. These metrics can be useful for understanding
the nature of online communities and how individuals form
connections with each other.
Overall, the results of this research highlight the impor-
tance of understanding the underlying dynamics of hate
speech on social media platforms. The proposed metrics for
measuring familiarity and similarity, along with the obser-
vation of homophily in the context of certain forms of hate
speech, can be valuable for developing targeted strategies to
reduce the prevalence of hate speech online.
Author contributions All authors have equal contribution.
Funding None
Data availability The datasets analysed during the current study are
publicly available and can be downloaded from https://​github.​com/​
ENCAS​EH2020/​hates​peech-​twitt​er and https://​www.​dropb​ox.​com/​sh/​
ayt6w​cjzcz​hhtwp/​AADS7​aDFIi​Ibh-​HtCax​dwsHqa?​dl=0
Page 15 of 16 138
Declarations
Conflict of interest The authors have no Conflict of interest to declare
that are relevant to the content of this article.
Ethics approval Not Applicable
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