Workshop Proceedings of the 19th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

Workshop: CySoc 2025: 6th International Workshop on Cyber Social Threats

DOI: 10.36190/2025.18

Published: 2025-06-05
Mapping Hate and Extremism: How Brazilian Reddit Communities Spread Toxic Discourse
Pedro Bento, Yan Aquino, Arthur Buzelin, Pedro Robles Dutenhefner, Arthur Chagas, Victoria Estanislau, Lucas Dayrell, Samira Malaquias, Caio Santana, Marcelo Sartori Locatelli, Gisele L. Pappa, Wagner Meira Jr., Virgilio Almeida

This study investigates the dynamics of hate speech and extremist discourse in Brazilian Reddit communities, focusing on both banned and non-banned subreddits. Leveraging over 20 million posts and comments, we employ two complementary approaches: Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT) to detect implicit semantic biases, and the Pysentimiento transformer model to classify hate speech in Portuguese-language content. Our results reveal that banned subreddits exhibit strong positive associations with hate-related terminology - particularly sexism - indicating a normalization of discriminatory la...