  While social media has become an empowering agent to individual voices and
freedom of expression, it also facilitates anti-social behaviors including
online harassment, cyberbullying, and hate speech. In this paper, we present
the first comparative study of hate speech instigators and target users on
Twitter. Through a multi-step classification process, we curate a comprehensive
hate speech dataset capturing various types of hate. We study the distinctive
characteristics of hate instigators and targets in terms of their profile
self-presentation, activities, and online visibility. We find that hate
instigators target more popular and high profile Twitter users, and that
participating in hate speech can result in greater online visibility. We
conduct a personality analysis of hate instigators and targets and show that
both groups have eccentric personality facets that differ from the general
Twitter population. Our results advance the state of the art of understanding
online hate speech engagement.
