The advent of social media has led to an increased concern over its potential to propagate hate speech and misinformation, which, in addition to contributing to prejudice and discrimination, has been suspected of playing a role in increasing social violence and crimes in the United States. While literature has shown the existence of an association between posting hate speech and misinformation online and certain personality traits of posters, the general relationship and relevance of online hate speech/misinformation in the context of overall psychological wellbeing of posters remain elusive. One difficulty lies in the lack of adequate data analytics tools capable of adequately analyzing the massive amount of social media posts to uncover the underlying hidden links. Recent progresses in machine learning and large language models such as ChatGPT have made such an analysis possible. In this study, we collected thousands of posts from carefully selected communities on the social media site Reddit. We then utilized OpenAI's GPT3 to derive embeddings of these posts, which are high-dimensional real-numbered vectors that presumably represent the hidden semantics of posts. We then performed various machine-learning classifications based on these embeddings in order to understand the role of hate speech/misinformation in various communities. Finally, a topological data analysis (TDA) was applied to the embeddings to obtain a visual map connecting online hate speech, misinformation, various psychiatric disorders, and general mental health.

The rise in online hate speech and the way it is reflected in the offline world is a hot topic in politics right now. The internet has given everyone a voice, which clearly has positive implications for the way citizens can publicly challenge authority and debate issues. It's fairly commonly assumed that this form of hate speech, particularly when encountered alongside other factors such as social deprivation or mental illness, has the potential to radicalize individuals in dangerous ways, and inspire them to commit illegal and violent acts. Just as terrorist organizations like ISIS can be seen using hate speech in videos and propaganda material intended to incite violence, racist and anti-Islamic material is thought to have inspired killers like Anders Breivik, who killed 69 youths in a 2011 shooting spree, and the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting in which 51 died. So far these links between online and real-world actions, though common sense tells us they are likely to exist, have been difficult to prove scientifically.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg went before Congress last week, the nominal focus was on the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Diamond and Silk came up a lot. At one point, Sen. John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, asked Zuckerberg about the company's content screening policies--and specifically, how it draws "the line between what is and what is not hate speech." Zuckerberg's answer focused on a speculative future in which artificial intelligence will keep Facebook civil.