Mining Communities of Bloggers: A Case Study on Cyber-hate

Abstract

Blogs, or Weblogs, have become increasingly popular in recent years. Research has found that racists and hate groups exist in communities of bloggers. As these communities allow hate groups to spread their ideologies and even advocate hate crimes, it is important to study the structure and behavior of these communities. In this study, we analyzed the blogs of 28 anti-black hate groups on Xanga, a popular blog hosting site, using a semi-automated framework that includes blog spidering, information extraction, network analysis, and visualization. Our findings suggested that bloggers formed communities through subscription, comment, and group co-membership relationships. Subscription and commenting relationships facilitated the communication between bloggers and could help spread information, propagandas, and ideologies faster. In addition, we compared our findings with previous studies and found some interesting similarities and differences. Overall, we believe our research on online hate groups in the blogosphere is timely and important to the security of our society, and several future research directions are suggested in the paper.