  Social media conversations frequently suffer from toxicity, creating
significant issues for users, moderators, and entire communities. Events in the
real world, like elections or conflicts, can initiate and escalate toxic
behavior online. Our study investigates how real-world events influence the
origin and spread of toxicity in online discussions across various languages
and regions. We gathered Reddit data comprising 4.5 million comments from 31
thousand posts in six different languages (Dutch, English, German, Arabic,
Turkish and Spanish). We target fifteen major social and political world events
that occurred between 2020 and 2023. We observe significant variations in
toxicity, negative sentiment, and emotion expressions across different events
and language communities, showing that toxicity is a complex phenomenon in
which many different factors interact and still need to be investigated. We
will release the data for further research along with our code.
