The Impact of Toxic Language on the Health of Reddit Communities

There are numerous on-line communities in which people converse about various topics and issues. It is usually necessary to monitor on-line forums to ensure that conversations and content are appropriate. Disturbing trends are starting to emerge, including cyberbullying, cyber threats, on-line harassment, hate speech, and abuse — referred to collectively as ‘toxicity’. Researchers have already started investigating automatic and semi-automatic monitoring of social networking sites for aspects of toxicity. We are investigating the relationship between on-line toxicity and forum health. Specifically, we provide results of the evaluation of the impact of toxicity on community health as a function of its size, while correcting for community topic.