Balancing the Scales: Addressing Gender Bias in Social Media Toxicity Detection

Beatriz Botella-Gil, Juan Pablo Consuegra-Ayala, Alba Bonet-Jover, Paloma Moreda-Pozo


Abstract
The detection of toxic content in social media has become a critical task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly given its intersection with complex issues like subjectivity, implicit language, and cultural context. Among these challenges, bias in training data remains a central concern—especially as language models risk reproducing and amplifying societal inequalities. This paper investigates the interplay between toxicity and gender bias on Twitter/X by introducing a novel dataset of violent and non-violent tweets, annotated not only for violence but also for gender. We conduct an exploratory analysis of how biased data can distort toxicity classification and present algorithms to mitigate these effects through dataset balancing and debiasing. Our contributions include four new dataset splits—two balanced and two debiased—that aim to support the development of fairer and more inclusive NLP models. By foregrounding the importance of equity in data curation, this work lays the groundwork for more ethical approaches to automated violence detection and gender annotation.
Anthology ID:
2025.ranlp-1.23
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era
Month:
September
Year:
2025
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Galia Angelova, Maria Kunilovskaya, Marie Escribe, Ruslan Mitkov
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
Note:
Pages:
194–203
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.23/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Beatriz Botella-Gil, Juan Pablo Consuegra-Ayala, Alba Bonet-Jover, and Paloma Moreda-Pozo. 2025. Balancing the Scales: Addressing Gender Bias in Social Media Toxicity Detection. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era, pages 194–203, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
Cite (Informal):
Balancing the Scales: Addressing Gender Bias in Social Media Toxicity Detection (Botella-Gil et al., RANLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.23.pdf