Voat Hate Speech Communities
A Voat (Reddit alternative, 2013–2020) dataset of 193,600 submissions, 1,478,207 comments, 32,586 users, 674,908 collaboration edges, collected by Mekacher & Papasavva (ICWSM 2022) via full platform crawl. Each record contains user nodes (registration date, moderation status), directed weighted edges (commenter→submitter, weight=upvotes+1), submission titles and bodies, comment text, upvotes, downvotes, depth. Aggregate of Voat communities containing explicit hate speech targeting racial, religious, and other minority groups. Included for research transparency — enables hate speech detection, toxicity modeling, and online radicalization studies using real platform data.. Suitable for hate speech detection, toxicity modeling, online radicalization, content moderation research, platform dynamics.
Cite this dataset at
voat-hate-speech.echo.directory
Analytics
The full graph has 32,586 nodes; this view shows the 1,000-node sample the pipeline drew for display. Node size is centrality, colour is community.
Topic 0
Topic 1
Topic 2
Topic 3
Topic 4
Topic 5
Topic 6
Topic 7
Topic 8
Topic 9
Topic 10
Topic 11
Show all 18 topics
Topic 12
Topic 13
Topic 14
Topic 15
Topic 16
Topic 17
Sampled: text metrics from 50K of 1.6M records; topic model from 20K.
Record
- Catalog key
voat-hate-speech- Authors
- Mekacher, Amin; Papasavva, Antonis
- Year
- 2022
- Source paper
- "I Can’t Keep It Up." A Dataset from the Defunct Voat.co News Aggregator
- DOI / arXiv
- 10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19382
- License
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) (CC-BY-4.0)
- Records
- 1,588,330
- Nodes
- 32,586
- Edges
- 674,908 (directed)
- Attributes
- nodes have attributes; edges have attributes
- Languages
- en
- Collected
- 2014/2020 (2010s, 2020s)
- Tasks
- Hate speech detection inferred
From the graph: link prediction, community detection - Region
- Global (inferred: the platform is used worldwide)
Provenance
- Originally published at
- https://zenodo.org/records/5841668 link checked
- Hosted copy
- Mirrored on echo.directory on 2026-10-09, 751.3 MB across 60 files. Checksums in MANIFEST.json.
How to cite
BibTeX
@misc{echo2026,
title = {ECHO: Exploratory Compendium of Humanity Online},
author = {Switzer, Braden and Zafarani, Reza},
year = {2026},
url = {https://echo.directory},
note = {Syracuse University}
}
@article{Mekacher_2022,
title = {“I Can’t Keep It Up.” A Dataset from the Defunct Voat.co News Aggregator},
volume = {16},
issn = {2162-3449},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19382},
doi = {10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19382},
journal = {Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media},
publisher = {Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)},
author = {Mekacher, Amin and Papasavva, Antonis},
year = {2022},
month = May,
pages = {1302–1311}
} APA
Switzer, B., & Zafarani, R. (2026). ECHO: Exploratory Compendium of Humanity Online [Data repository]. Syracuse University. https://echo.directory
Mekacher, A., & Papasavva, A. (2022). Voat Hate Speech Communities [Data set]. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19382
MLA
Switzer, Braden, and Reza Zafarani. ECHO: Exploratory Compendium of Humanity Online. Syracuse University, 2026, echo.directory.
Mekacher, Amin, and Antonis Papasavva. Voat Hate Speech Communities. 2022, doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19382.
