The Impact of Textual Online Harassment on the Performance of Projects in Crowdfunding

In the consequence-free and anonymous online environment, online harassment has become a serious problem. In many crowdfunding platforms, there exists offensive speech on the project pages, which might force potential funders to leave the discussion and to give up investment. The effect of online harassment on project performance remains unknown. This study attempts to investigate to what extent the textual online harassment score and the project creator’s attitude towards textual online harassment might affect project performance. We constructed a Kickstarter panel dataset consisting of 388,100 projects and designed a novel framework and an algorithm BiLSTM-CNN to extract the textual online harassment score from comments, which can reach column-wise mean ROC AUC of 0.9463. This study contributes to crowdfunding and online harassment literature and provides important implications for reputation management of projects and crowdfunding platform design.

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