Detecting the usage of vulgar words in cyberbully activities from Twitter

Abstract

Nowadays, nearly all people utilize the device which is connected to Internet. People are accustomed to the use information technology devices in their daily life to interact with other people. Currently, many social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube are becoming popular. This study selected Twitter platforms, which is started to gain popularity. By the rapid growth of users signing up for Twitter accounts, at the same time, cybercrime started to bloom each year in social media platforms. Cyberbully is one of the cybercrime practices which had caused a significant impact on the targeted victims. The victims experienced social pressure, which they need to bear each day while the bullies stayed free behind the veil of anonymity. This study aims to identify the common vulgar words used by the cyberbullies on Twitter. Also, this study is subject to produce essential features of Twitter based on the collected tweets. The evaluation in this study includes the occurrences of the vulgar word perpetrated by the cyberbullies from Twitter. This study detected the usage of vulgar words in cyberbully activities on Twitter platform. A list of vulgar words were extracted and evaluated from a corpus of 50 Twitter users who posted a various number of tweets. The vulgar words detection in the tweets enable the tracking process of the cyberbully activities. In the evaluation section, we discussed how the usage of the vulgar words would define the user's earnestness in doing the cyberbully activities in the Twitter. This study shows there are users with a low number of tweets have a high number of vulgar words occurrences, while other users with high numbers of tweets but less number of vulgar words occurrences. The information collected in this study is expected to assist marking users with a high number of vulgar words occurrences who tend to have high possibilities in doing cyber-bully activities.