CrisisNews: A Dataset Mapping Two Decades of News Articles on Online Problematic Behavior at Scale

Abstract

As social media adoption grows globally, online problematic behaviors increasingly escalate into large-scale crises, requiring an evolving set of mitigation strategies. While HCI research often analyzes problematic behaviors with pieces of user-generated content as the unit of analysis, less attention has been given to event-focused perspectives that track how discrete events evolve. In this paper, we examine 'social media crises': discrete patterns of problematic behaviors originating and evolving within social media that cause larger-scale harms. Using global news coverage, we present a dataset of 93,250 news articles covering social media-endemic crises from the past 20 years. We analyze a representative subset to classify stakeholder roles, behavior types, and outcomes, uncovering patterns that inform more nuanced classification of social media crises beyond content-based descriptions. By adopting a wider perspective, this research seeks to inform the design of safer platforms, enabling proactive measures to mitigate crises and foster more trustworthy online environments.