Negative Feedback Fuels Hate Speech: A Deep Learning Analysis of 25 Million News Comments

This study investigates the dynamics of hate speech, looking at feedback on comments and subsequent commenting. We examine the relationship between feedback on comments, hate speech presence, and commenter types, with analysis of news comments during the 2022 South Korean presidential election campaigns. The data include 25 million comments, analyzed with a deep learning hate speech detection model. It was found that positive feedback encourages more commenting for non-hateful content, and negative feedback reduces subsequent non-hateful comments. However, surprisingly, negative feedback was found to rather increase the frequency of hateful comments, particularly among light commenters. Implications of the findings are discussed.