{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.026037428803905614, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.119402985074627, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Supporting a Storm: The Impact of Community on #GamerGate's Lifespan

Over the past half-decade, we have seen repeated examples of “firestorms” on social media. These often-negative events focus enormous bursts of attention on particular individuals or topics. While they often die out within days, in some cases, they persist far longer. In this paper, we study one such storm, #GamerGate, with the goal of identifying key differences between it and other, smaller events. We find that this storm has a distinct pattern of growth that differentiates it from previous events: Rather than exploding quickly and burning out, it grows more slowly and develops an underlying community structure. Furthermore, we find that participation in this community structure is a key indicator of whether a user will continue using the hashtag over the following year. Finally, we find that users that become active later in the storm's lifetime contribute significantly to this community structure, though they appear to interact less overall with “older” users. Our results are the first to suggest that the formation of network structures plays a significant and fundamental role in determining the lifecycle of these large-scale firestorms.