Mining Communities of Bloggers: A Case Study on Cyber Hate

This article focuses on Data Mining and Social Network Analysis (SNA) amongst bloggers, and in particular the mining of racist groups and cyber hate communities in online blogging websites. The authors investigated 28 anti-black hate groups on the blogging website Xanga, and applied SNA techniques to study their network structures and online behaviour. The methodology used by the authors is based on a semi-automated framework and the article explains how they collected the blogs, analyzed their relationships, and presented their analysis and results. Their framework consists of four main modules: Blog Spider, Information Extraction, Network Analysis, and Visualization. The authors also discuss how they found some interesting similarities and differences amongst hate communities online, and suggest future research directions.

This article will be of use to researchers, scholars and practitioners interested in methods for mining blogger communities, and particularly those interested in cyber hate communities and other forms of online extremism.