The Dynamics of Offensive Messages in the World of Social Media: the Control of Cyberbullying on Twitter

摘要

The 21st century has redefined the way we communicate, our concept ofindividual and group privacy, and the dynamics of acceptable behavioral norms.The messaging dynamics on Twitter, an internet social network, has opened newways/modes of spreading information. As a result cyberbullying or in general,the spread of offensive messages, is a prevalent problem. The aim of thisreport is to identify and evaluate conditions that would dampen the role ofcyberbullying dynamics on Twitter. We present a discrete-time non-linearcompartmental model to explore how the introduction of a Quarantine class mayhelp to hinder the spread of offensive messages. We based the parameters ofthis model on recent Twitter data related to a topic that communities woulddeem most offensive, and found that for Twitter a level of quarantine canalways be achieved that will immediately suppress the spread of offensivemessages, and that this level of quarantine is independent of the number ofoffenders spreading the message. We hope that the analysis of this dynamicmodel will shed some insights into the viability of new models of methods forreducing cyberbullying in public social networks.