Loading latest metrics...
Historical Events & Rates
Hover to view unrounded metrics computation.
r/CharacterAI submissions, pre-registered harm term matching. See methodology below.
Concern Signal Index: r/CharacterAI weekly harm-language rate
Submission volume per week (context). Rate spikes in low-volume weeks are less reliable.
Comparison: r/replika weekly harm-language rate
r/replika is shown as a comparison case — another companion-app community where users were not direct subjects of the Garcia litigation. The two communities differ on many dimensions, so divergences between them are suggestive rather than definitive. A spike appearing in r/CharacterAI but not in r/replika during a specific week is nonetheless more consistent with an event-driven interpretation than with a general companion-app trend.
Representative excerpts
These excerpts are the first five matching submissions by timestamp from each peak week. They illustrate what the regex classifier captures — not only clinical concern, but also hyperbolic self-description and roleplay framing. Readers should review excerpts to form their own interpretation of what the harm rate measures.
Methodology
How the Concern Signal Index is calculated
For each ISO week, we count the number of submissions in the subreddit whose title or body text contains at least one harm pattern (case-insensitive regex match). We divide that count by the total number of submissions that week to get the harm rate. The benefit rate is computed the same way using the benefit pattern list.
Data: Public Reddit submissions from r/CharacterAI (primary) and r/replika (comparison case), retrieved via PullPush.io & Arctic Shift, covering August 2024 through today. Comments not included in this version.
- Harm Rate: Share of weekly submissions matching harm patterns. The primary "Concern Signal Index".
- 11-Week Trailing Mean: The mean harm rate across the 11 complete weeks immediately preceding the latest complete week (a ~3 month baseline).
- Benefit Rate: Share of weekly submissions matching benefit patterns (shown in tooltips).
Classification: The term lists below were registered before the first data pull and have not been modified. A submission matches a category if any pattern in that category is found in its title or selftext. Pattern matching is purely lexical: it does not detect sarcasm, quotation, or context reversal.
Harm Patterns
Benefit Patterns
Limitations
- Lexical ambiguity: Several regex patterns catch words that carry different meanings in different contexts. For example, 'support' matches both 'a supportive conversation' (the sense the benefit classifier intends) and 'customer support' (references to the app company's help channels, unrelated to user wellbeing). Similarly, 'help' matches both expressions of distress ('I need help') and mundane product discussion ('help with creative writing'). The classifier cannot distinguish these. Readers should consult the Representative Excerpts section to audit how terms are being used in practice, and interpret the benefit rate accordingly.
- Submissions only, not comments.
- Regex matching cannot detect sarcasm, context reversal, or new vocabulary not in the pre-registered lists.
- Reddit users are a self-selected enthusiast population and do not represent the full user base of either app.
- Retrospective window begins August 2024, which provides roughly 12 weeks of pre-lawsuit baseline.
- Weeks with low submission volume produce noisy rate estimates.