We collect social media comments about top news stories. The H|O|T Speech Metric is a calibrated estimate of the percentage of those comments that people would label as Hateful, Offensive, or Toxic. Higher scores are worse!

Consistently, YouTube had the H|O|Ttest comments and reddit the least, with X (Twitter) falling between.

On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. While there was an immediate uptick in H|O|T comments, particularly on YouTube, in the week or two after the invasion, the general temperature of social media comments on top news stories did not seem to be noticeably higher thereafter when compared to pre-February 24 scores.

Elon Musk announced his Twitter acquisition bid on April 14, 2022; media reports of the deal began on April 23; and the deal officially closed on October 27. Since Musk’s acquisition, there have been sporadic reports of increased hate speech, for example, on X, but we haven’t seen a significant uptick in the H|O|T Speech scores related to top news stories during that time (October 2022 - June 2023). However, for that same time period, the Iffy Quotient went up significantly on X even though the H|O|T Speech scores didn’t.

These are the stories with the highest H|O|T Speech scores on Reddit for the week ending on October 29, 2023. The two H|O|Ttest stories are about Donald Trump and the Biden family. Other story topics with H|O|T comments include other politicians (both U.S. and non-U.S.), bomb threats to schools, a mass shooting in Maine, and sexual abuse in the Catholic church.

In this story about a 12-year-old child who emailed bomb threats to local schools, the H|O|T comments typically feature expletives used in various ways, sometimes generically and other times more directly and aggressively. Some of the H|O|T comments also denigrate a particular target—for example, the child at the center of the story or local legislators.