Investigating Users’ Motives for Engaging in Flaming by Analyzing Despise Tweets

The purpose of this study is to investigate the motives of SNS users to engage in flaming by analyzing collected tweets. We hypothesized that SNS users make a downward comparison with flaming targets to show off their superiority, and we defined tweets that verbally despise a target as "despise tweets." We investigated the proportion of despise tweets in 10 flaming and 4 non-flaming cases. As a result, we found that the proportion increased in all flaming cases. The correlation coefficients between the number of tweets and the proportion were positive for all flaming cases, which strongly supported our hypothesis. The results also suggest that it is possible to classify the patterns of flaming by examining the time when the maximum value of the proportion of despise tweets is reached. Specifically, we found that the proportion reached its maximum value earlier than the peak number of tweets in one-sided flaming cases, while it reached its peak later in cases where both sides of a controversial issue were present. Thus, it is possible to visualize the structure and background of flaming by tracking the relationship between the number of despise tweets and the number of tweets over time.