Albina Fatykhova

Author directory

2026

Multilingual moderation systems often need to account for the possibility that online incivility is expressed differently across languages, beyond differences in vocabulary or other surface-level linguistic features. To examine this issue, we analyze a manually annotated bilingual corpus of 800 YouTube comments (400 English and 400 Russian) labeled across four dimensions: incivility type, severity, target, and clarity of expression. While severity does not differ significantly between the two corpora (Cramér’s V = .06), significant differences emerge for type, target, and clarity (V = .13, .22, and .10, respectively). English comments contain more abusive and explicit forms of incivility, whereas Russian comments more frequently target individuals and employ implicit expression, including sarcasm and irony. User engagement analyzes further show that the forms of incivility associated with greater visibility differ across the two corpora. Together, these findings suggest that, within the corpora examined, severity is comparatively stable across languages, whereas communicative dimensions exhibit greater cross-linguistic variation. The results suggest that multilingual moderation may benefit from distinguishing comparatively stable dimensions from language-sensitive communicative dimensions when developing annotation guidelines and moderation resources.