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A Measurement Study of Genetic Testing Conversations on Reddit and 4Chan Proceedings of the Fourteenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2020) “And We Will Fight for Our Race!” A Measurement Study of Genetic Testing Conversations on Reddit and 4chan Alexandros Mittos, Savvas Zannettou,† Jeremy Blackburn,‡ Emiliano De Cristofaro University College London, †Max-Planck-Institut fur¨ Informatik, ‡Binghamton University {a.mittos, e.decristofaro}@ucl.ac.uk, [email protected], [email protected] Abstract Alas, increased popularity of self-administered genetic tests has also been accompanied by media reports of far-right Progress in genomics has enabled the emergence of a boom- ing market for “direct-to-consumer” genetic testing. Nowa- groups using it to attack minorities or prove their genetic days, companies like 23andMe and AncestryDNA provide af- “purity” (Reeve 2016), mirroring concerns of a new wave of fordable health, genealogy, and ancestry reports, and have al- scientific racism (Reich 2018). Also, statements from Don- ready tested tens of millions of customers. At the same time, ald Trump led Senator Warren to publicly confirm her Native alt- and far-right groups have also taken an interest in genetic American ancestry via genetic testing (Linskey 2018). testing, using them to attack minorities and prove their ge- Interest in DTC genetic testing by right-wing communi- netic “purity.” In this paper, we present a measurement study ties comes at a time when racism, hate, and antisemitism on shedding light on how genetic testing is being discussed on platforms like 4chan, Gab, and certain communities on Red- Web communities in Reddit and 4chan. We collect 1.3M comments posted over 27 months on the two platforms, us- dit is on the rise (Hine et al. 2017; Zannettou et al. 2020). ing a set of 280 keywords related to genetic testing. We then Thus, these trends are particularly worrying, also consid- use NLP and computer vision tools to identify trends, themes, ering how technology has been disrupting society in previ- and topics of discussion. Our analysis shows that genetic ously unconsidered ways (Gorodnichenko and others 2018); testing attracts a lot of attention on Reddit and 4chan, with the fact that racist, misogynistic, and dangerous behavior discussions often including highly toxic language expressed festers and spreads on the Web at an unprecedented scale, through hateful, racist, and misogynistic comments. In par- eventually making its way into the real world, prompts the ticular, on 4chan’s politically incorrect board (/pol/), content need for a thorough understanding of how these genetic from genetic testing conversations involves several alt-right testing tools are being (mis)used in online discussions. As personalities and openly antisemitic rhetoric, often conveyed genetics-based arguments for discrimination (BBC 2019), through memes. Finally, we find that discussions build around user groups, from technology enthusiasts to communities pro- and even genocide (e.g., the Holocaust), have been made in moting fringe political views. the past, this should not be overlooked. While other aspects of genetic testing have been stud- ied (e.g., how they affect one’s perception of racial iden- Introduction tity (Panofsky and Donovan 2017; Roth and Ivemark 2018)), Over the past decade, researchers have made tremendous we are interested in the relation between genetic testing and progress toward understanding the human genome. With in- online hate. This is a topic that has not been thoroughly stud- creasingly low costs, millions of people can afford to learn ied by the scientific community, despite, as discussed ear- about their genetic make-up, not only in diagnostic settings, lier, increasingly worrisome indications of far-right groups but also to satisfy their curiosity about traits, wellness, or exploiting genetic testing for racist rhetoric. With this mo- discover their ancestry and genealogy. A number of compa- tivation in mind, we identify and address the following re- nies have successfully marketed direct-to-consumer (DTC) search questions: (1) What is the overall prevalence of ge- genetic tests: individuals purchase a kit (typically around netic testing discourse on social networks like Reddit and $100), mail it back with a saliva sample, and receive on- 4chan? (2) In what context do users discuss genetic testing? line reports after a few days. DTC companies offer a wide (3) Is genetic testing associated with far-right views, racist range of services, from romantic match-making to reports ideologies, hate speech, and/or white supremacy? (4) If yes, of health risks, wellness, hereditary traits, etc. Popular prod- in what context? Can we identify specific themes? ucts also include genetic ancestry tests, which promise a We compile and use a set of 280 keywords related to ge- way to discover one’s ancestral roots, building on patterns netic testing to extract all available posts and comments from of genetic variations common in people from similar back- Reddit and 4chan. We collect 7K threads from the politically grounds (NIH 2019). AncestryDNA alone has tested more incorrect (/pol/) board of 4chan (consisting of 1.3M posts) than 16M customers as of Jan 2020 (AncestryDNA 2020). from Jun 30, 2016 to Mar 13, 2018, and 77K comments Copyright c 2020, Association for the Advancement of Artificial from Reddit related to genetic testing from Jan 1, 2016 to Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. Mar 31, 2018, and analyze them along several axes to un- 452 derstand how genetic testing is being discussed online. We survey questions are often phrased poorly, thus leading to rely on natural language processing, computer vision, and possible misinterpretations of the results. Finally, (Couldry machine learning tools, including (i) Latent Dirichlet Allo- and Yu 2018) discuss how DTC genetic companies, such as cation (LDA) to identify topics of discussion, (ii) word em- 23andMe, influence the public toward sharing their genetic beddings to uncover words used in a similar context across data by claiming that the abundance of data will improve datasets, (iii) Google’s Perspective API (Perspective 2019) people’s lives in the long term, despite a body of work show- to measure toxicity in texts, and (iv) Perceptual Hashing to ing that genetic data cannot be securely anonymized (Gym- assess the imagery and memes shared in posts. rek et al. 2013; Shringarpure and Bustamante 2015). Overall, the main findings of our study include: 1. Genetic testing is often discussed on /pol/ and on sub- Overall, most of the research in this area mostly relies on reddits associated with hateful, racist, and sexist content. qualitative studies examining the societal effects of genetic These communities discuss genetic testing in a highly testing (Caulfield and McGuire 2012; Darst et al. 2013) and toxic manner, often suggesting its use to marginalize or lacks quantitative large-scale measurements. even eliminate minorities. Online Hate. Researchers have also studied hate speech 2. Our image analysis on /pol/ shows the recurrent pres- on mainstream social networks like Twitter (Silva et al. ence of popular alt-right personalities and “popular” an- 2016; Mondal, Silva, and Benevenuto 2017; Davidson et al. tisemitic memes along with genetic testing discussions. 2017; Olteanu et al. 2018), Reddit (Olteanu et al. 2018), 3. Word embeddings analysis reveals that certain subred- Facebook (Ben-David and Matamoros-Fernandez 2016), dits use ethnic terms in conjunction with genetic testing YouTube (Ottoni et al. 2018), and Instagram (Hosseinmardi keywords in the same way as /pol/, which may be an in- et al. 2015). Closer to our work is research on fringe com- dicator of 4chan’s fringe ideologies spilling out on more munities in 4chan and Reddit. Specifically, (Bernstein et al. mainstream Web communities. 2011) study 5M posts on the random (/b/) board to exam- 4. Reddit users are not uniformly interested in all aspects of ine how anonymity and ephemerality work in 4chan, while genetic testing, rather, they form groups ranging from en- (Hine et al. 2017) focus on /pol/, studying 8M posts col- thusiasts to people who use genetic keywords exclusively lected over two and a half months. Their content analysis in subreddits that discuss fringe political views. reveals that, while most URLs point to YouTube, a non- negligible amount link to right-wing websites. Then, (Zan- Related Work nettou et al. 2018) detect and study racist and hateful memes, Genetic Testing & Society. (Panofsky and Donovan 2017) and their propagation, on 4chan, Gab, Reddit, and Twit- analyze 70 discussion threads on the far-right website ter. (Zannettou et al. 2020) study antisemitism on /pol/ and Stormfront.org, where at least one user posted ancestry test Gab, revealing that antisemitic content increases in those results. They group posters based on whether they consider networks after major political events, such as the “Unite their results good and bad, and study how other Stormfront the Right” rally or the 2016 US elections. (Chandrasekha- users react: if the posters receive “bad news,” they tend to ran et al. 2017) study how Reddit’s decision to ban several question the validity of genetic genealogy science, trying to subreddits that violated anti-harassment policy affected hate reinterpret their results to fit their views on races. In follow- speech on the platform. They examine 100M posts and com- up work (Panofsky and Donovan 2019), they also look at ments from two banned subreddits, namely r/fatpeoplehate the relationship between
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