Beyond the Binary: Analysing Transphobic Hate and Harassment Online

AbstractOnline communities provide support and help to individuals transitioning gender. However, this point of transition also increases vulnerability, coupled with increased exposure to online harms. In this research, we analyse a popular hate and harassment site known for targeting minority groups, including transgender people. We analyse 17 million posts dating back to 2012 to gain insights into the types of information collected about targets. We find users commonly link to social media sites such as Twitter/X and meticulously archive links related to their targets. We scrape over 150,000 relevant links posted to Twitter/X and their archived versions and analyse the profiles and posts. We find targets often tweet about harassment, popculture, and queer and gender-related discussions. We develop and evaluate classifiers to detect calls for harassment, doxxing, mention of transgender individuals, and toxic/abusive speech within the forum posts. The results of our classifiers show that forum posts about transgender individuals are significantly more likely to contain other harmful content.