Stoking the Flames: Understanding Escalation in an Online Harassment Community

Online harassment remains a prevalent problem for internet users. Its impact is made orders of magnitude worse when multiple harassers coordinate to conduct networked attacks. This paper presents an analysis of 231 threads in Kiwi Farms, a notorious online harassment community. We find that networked online harassment campaigns consists of three phases: target introduction, network decision, and network response. The first stage consists of the initial narrative elements, that are approved or not in stage two and expanded in stage three. Narrative building is a common element of all three stages. The network plays a key role in narrative building, adding elements to the narrative in at least 80 % of the threads, resulting in sustained harassment. This finding is central to our model of Continuous Narrative Escalation (CNE), that has two parts: (1) narrative continuation, the action of repeatedly adding new information to the existing narrative and (2) escalation, the aggravation of harassment that occurs as a consequence. In addition, we present insights from our analysis of 100 takedown requests threads, discussing received abuse reports. We find that these takedown requests are misused by the community and are used as elements to further fuel the narrative. We use our findings and framework to come up with a set of recommendations, that can inform harassment interventions and make online spaces safer.

对于互联网用户来说，在线骚扰仍然是一个普遍的问题。当多个骚扰者协调进行联网攻击时，其影响的数量级会变得更糟。本文对臭名昭著的在线骚扰社区的奇异果农场中的231个线程进行了分析。我们发现网络在线骚扰活动包括三个阶段：目标介绍，网络决策和网络响应。第一阶段由最初的叙述要素组成，这些元素在第二阶段被批准或不批准，并在第三阶段扩展。叙事建筑是所有三个阶段的共同元素。该网络在叙事建设中起着关键作用，在至少80％的线程中增加了叙事的元素，从而导致了持续的骚扰。这一发现是我们连续叙事升级模型（CNE）的核心，该模型有两个部分：（1）叙事延续，反复向现有叙述中添加新信息的作用以及（2）升级，结果加剧了骚扰的加剧。 此外，我们从分析100个撤销请求线程的分析中提供了见解，讨论收到的滥用报告。我们发现，这些撤销要求被社区滥用，并被用作进一步推动叙述的要素。我们使用我们的发现和框架来提出一系列建议，这些建议可以告知骚扰干预措施并使在线空间更安全。