Technology-Assisted Social Reforms and Online Hate Content: Insights from India

In the current scenario while everything seems digitalized, we often spend more time scrolling across various social platforms as compared to what we spend in any other real life activities. It becomes a matter of great concern when it comes to analyze what we see and how it is interpreted. Through this paper we aims to identify the influence of technology assisted social-reform initiatives on gender-based hate content generation. With the help of Twitter API, 112577 government-initiated and 58370 citizen-initiated movement(s) tweets have been extracted. This collected data is examined for hatred nature content in terms of emotions using a software programmed in R programming language, the scores for each emotion is counted and a comparison between both the moments is made. The study clearly shows that the Citizen-initiated moments shares comparatively more hate content than the Government-initiated movements as the scores particular to specific emotions like anger, disgust, and sadness is more. This cognitive study can be helpful in policy making, promoting gender based equality, defining strategies to rebuild citizen initiatives in a hate-free environment and controlling hate content generation.

Keywords:
Social reforms; hate content; India; Twitter; Social media; MeToo; technology.

Feature/Emotion	Govt.-initiated movement (Shrine verdict)	Citizen-initiated movement (MeToo)
Initiators	Initiators are lawmakers	Initiators are victims
Impact	The positive impact is more than the negative	The positive impact is more than the negative
Trust	As the movement is initiated by the government and lawmakers, trust is more (25 percentage)	Trust is less (18 percentage) as the citizen think more for trusting each other
Fear	As the movement is supported legally, fear is more (19 percentage)	Fear is less (17 percentage) to tweet as the movement is not yet covered under the legal framework
Anticipation	As the people expect more from the government and lawmakers, the anticipation is more (15 percentage)	Comparatively, the anticipation is less (14 percentage) as the lawmakers, and the government is not involved in the movement
Anger	Anger is less (12 percentage) as no particular citizen is victimized	As the people (victims) are harassed, the anger is dominating (15 percentage)
Joy/Sadness	As the movement is initiated by the government, without the effort of citizen and making changes in the society, the citizens have more joy than the sadness	Being the victims of harassment or well-wishers of the victims, the people expressed more sadness than the joy
Disgust	Disgust is less (7 percentage) as no hostile or unpleasant behavior towards a particular person	Act as a platform to share their worst experiences in life, hence, content possess more (9 percentage) disgust than in government-initiated movement
Surprise	As the movement is planned and implemented, there is less surprise	As the movement is not planned and suddenly occurred, the surprise emotion is more

Instituto de Tecnologia do Paraná - Tecpar Rua Prof. Algacyr Munhoz Mader, 3775 - CIC, 81350-010 Curitiba PR Brazil, Tel.: +55 41 3316-3052/3054, Fax: +55 41 3346-2872 - Curitiba - PR - Brazil
E-mail: babt@tecpar.br

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[1] Editor-in-Chief: Alexandre Rasi Aoki