Early-warning model developed to predict toxic social media storms

Researchers at the University at Albany and Rutgers University have developed an early-warning framework that can predict harmful social media interactions before they erupt, paving the way for interventions that can minimize harm and make platforms safer for users. Using publicly available datasets from Reddit and Instagram, two social media platforms with distinct conversation dynamics, researchers trained models to predict from just the first 10 comments whether a thread would escalate into “concentrated waves of toxic interactions”—or what they have dubbed a “negative storm” or “neg storm.”

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