Is there a link between hate messages and psychiatric disorders? This is at least what a new analysis of messages published on the Reddit content aggregator suggests, both in groups sharing hateful points of view, and others evoking certain psychiatric problems.
These works, carried out by doctors Andrew William Alexander and Hongbin Wang, of Texas A&M University, were published in PLOS Digital Health.
In the opinion of the authors, the omnipresence of social media raises questions about the role of the latter in the dissemination of hate speech and disinformation, in addition to possibly fueling damages, discrimination and violent acts in the “real world”.
Thus, previous studies have already demonstrated the existence of associations between certain personality traits and the fact of publishing such hateful content, or even false news.
However, it was still unknown, so far, if there were such links between psychological well-being and precisely publishing this type of messages and content.
To see more clearly, the two researchers turned to artificial intelligence tools to analyze publications from 54 communities integrated into Reddit, and which are linked to hate speech, disinformation, psychiatric disorders, or even for control, for none of these three categories.
Among the selected groups, there was R/ADHD, a community aimed at discussing the deficit disorder of attention and hyperactivity; R/NONEWORMAL, where we speak of disinformation about COVVI-19, or even R/INCELS, a community banned because of the hate speeches that have been published there.
The study authors converted thousands of publications disseminated in these communities to digital representations indicating the underlying language trends in said messages. These representations, it is said, could then be analyzed via machine learning methods, as well as the help of a mathematical approach called the topological analysis of the data.
Links between hate speech and narcissism
The analysis in question therefore revealed that the language trends present in communities with hate speech were similar to those found in communities dedicated to post-traumatic stress syndrome, as well as those devoted to personalities Bordelinenarcissistic and anti -social.
Links between disinformation and psychiatric disorders were less clear, but there seemed to be certain connections with anxiety disorders, write the researchers.
Even more importantly, the authors of the study underline, the conclusions suggest “at all” to hear that people suffering from psychiatric disorders were more inclined to disseminate hateful content or disinformation.
In fact, there was no way to determine whether the publications analyzed had been written by people who really received a diagnosis.
However, specialists say that their conclusions could feed new strategies aimed at fighting hate speech and false news, in particular by dealing with this using therapeutic aspects developed to treat psychiatric disorders.
“Our results indicate that the language tendencies of people disseminating hate speech had important resemblances to the structures of people participating in communities relating to certain psychiatric disorders, including narcissistic personalities, antisocial people, or people borderline“, Still underline the authors.
“These disorders are generally known as being linked to a lack of empathy or interest in the well-being of others, or even difficulties in managing anger and relations with others. »»
All this makes Dr. Alexander say that it “seems to be a good indicator of the fact that swimming in this kind of communities (promoting hate speech, editor’s note), for long periods, is not healthy and can make us less empathic towards others”.
