  Recently, social media platforms are heavily moderated to prevent the spread
of online hate speech, which is usually fertile in toxic words and is directed
toward an individual or a community. Owing to such heavy moderation, newer and
more subtle techniques are being deployed. One of the most striking among these
is fear speech. Fear speech, as the name suggests, attempts to incite fear
about a target community. Although subtle, it might be highly effective, often
pushing communities toward a physical conflict. Therefore, understanding their
prevalence in social media is of paramount importance. This article presents a
large-scale study to understand the prevalence of 400K fear speech and over
700K hate speech posts collected from Gab.com. Remarkably, users posting a
large number of fear speech accrue more followers and occupy more central
positions in social networks than users posting a large number of hate speech.
They can also reach out to benign users more effectively than hate speech users
through replies, reposts, and mentions. This connects to the fact that, unlike
hate speech, fear speech has almost zero toxic content, making it look
plausible. Moreover, while fear speech topics mostly portray a community as a
perpetrator using a (fake) chain of argumentation, hate speech topics hurl
direct multitarget insults, thus pointing to why general users could be more
gullible to fear speech. Our findings transcend even to other platforms
(Twitter and Facebook) and thus necessitate using sophisticated moderation
policies and mass awareness to combat fear speech.
