  The Web has become the main source for news acquisition. At the same time,
news discussion has become more social: users can post comments on news
articles or discuss news articles on other platforms like Reddit. These
features empower and enable discussions among the users; however, they also act
as the medium for the dissemination of toxic discourse and hate speech. The
research community lacks a general understanding on what type of content
attracts hateful discourse and the possible effects of social networks on the
commenting activity on news articles. In this work, we perform a large-scale
quantitative analysis of 125M comments posted on 412K news articles over the
course of 19 months. We analyze the content of the collected articles and their
comments using temporal analysis, user-based analysis, and linguistic analysis,
to shed light on what elements attract hateful comments on news articles. We
also investigate commenting activity when an article is posted on either
4chan's Politically Incorrect board (/pol/) or six selected subreddits. We find
statistically significant increases in hateful commenting activity around
real-world divisive events like the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville
and political events like the second and third 2016 US presidential debates.
Also, we find that articles that attract a substantial number of hateful
comments have different linguistic characteristics when compared to articles
that do not attract hateful comments. Furthermore, we observe that the post of
a news articles on either /pol/ or the six subreddits is correlated with an
increase of (hateful) commenting activity on the news articles.
