  The Internet and online forums such as Reddit have become an increasingly
popular medium for citizens to engage in political conversations. However, the
online disinhibition effect resulting from the ability to use pseudonymous
identities may manifest in the form of offensive speech, consequently making
political discussions more aggressive and polarizing than they already are.
Such environments may result in harassment and self-censorship from its
targets. In this paper, we present preliminary results from a large-scale
temporal measurement aimed at quantifying offensiveness in online political
discussions.
  To enable our measurements, we develop and evaluate an offensive speech
classifier. We then use this classifier to quantify and compare offensiveness
in the political and general contexts. We perform our study using a database of
over 168M Reddit comments made by over 7M pseudonyms between January 2015 and
January 2017 -- a period covering several divisive political events including
the 2016 US presidential elections.
