We present the results of predictive modelling for the detection of anti-social behaviour in online communication in Arabic, such as comments which contain obscene or offensive words and phrases. We collected and labelled a large dataset of YouTube comments in Arabic which contains a broad range of both offensive and inoffensive comments. We used this dataset to train a Support Vector Machine classifier and experimented with combinations of word-level features, N-gram features and a variety of pre-processing techniques. We summarise the pre-processing steps and features that allow training a classifier which is more precise, with 90.05% accuracy, than classifiers reported by previous studies on Arabic text. (C) 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.