Raiders of the lost Kek: 3.5 years of augmented 4chan posts from the politically incorrect board
Files
Accepted manuscript
Date
2020-06-08
DOI
Authors
Papasavva, Antonis
Zannettou, Savvas
De Cristofaro, Emiliano
Stringhini, Gianluca
Blackburn, Jeremy
Version
Accepted manuscript
OA Version
Citation
Antonis Papasavva, Savvas Zannettou, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Gianluca Stringhini, Jeremy Blackburn. 2020. "Raiders of the Lost Kek: 3.5 Years of Augmented 4chan Posts from the Politically Incorrect Board." AAAI International Conference on Web and Social Media
Abstract
This paper presents a dataset with over 3.3M threads and
134.5M posts from the Politically Incorrect board (/pol/) of
the imageboard forum 4chan, posted over a period of almost
3.5 years (June 2016–November 2019). To the best of our
knowledge, this represents the largest publicly available 4chan
dataset, providing the community with an archive of posts that
have been permanently deleted from 4chan and are otherwise
inaccessible. We augment the data with a set of additional
labels, including toxicity scores and the named entities mentioned
in each post. We also present a statistical analysis of the
dataset, providing an overview of what researchers interested
in using it can expect, as well as a simple content analysis,
shedding light on the most prominent discussion topics, the
most popular entities mentioned, and the toxicity level of each
post. Overall, we are confident that our work will motivate
and assist researchers in studying and understanding 4chan, as
well as its role on the greater Web. For instance, we hope this
dataset may be used for cross-platform studies of social media,
as well as being useful for other types of research like natural
language processing. Finally, our dataset can assist qualitative
work focusing on in-depth case studies of specific narratives,
events, or social theories.