Hate Speech Archives - VOX

Auditing Elon Musk’s Impact on Hate Speech and Bots

October 30, 2024

On October 27th, 2022, Elon Musk purchased Twitter, becoming its new CEO and firing many top executives in the process. Musk listed fewer restrictions on content moderation and removal of spam bots among his goals for the platform. Given findings of prior research on moderation and hate speech in online communities, the promise of less ...

Sex Sells Terrorism: How Sexual Appeals in Fringe Online Communities Contribute to Self-Radicalization

October 30, 2024

The past several years have seen rising hate crimes, terrorist attacks, and broader extremist movements, with news reports often noting that these movements can be traced back to fringe online communities. Yet the question remains why such online groups appear more likely to foster radicalization than those in other contexts. This netnographic case study demonstrates ...

Ecosystems of Hate: understanding the relationship between terrorism, hate crime, and hate speech

October 24, 2024

Hate underpins a variety of criminal behaviors, including terrorism, hate crime, and hate speech. However, disciplinary fragmentation has obscured their relationships. This chapter reviews the multidisciplinary research evidence concerning the relationships between terrorism, hate crime, and hate speech. It uncovers the empirical and theoretical knowledge gaps, and it proposes a new theoretical framework—Ecosystems of Hate—which ...

From online hate speech to offline hate crime: the role of inflammatory language in forecasting violence against migrant and LGBT communities

October 20, 2024

Social media messages often provide insights into offline behaviors. Although hate speech proliferates rapidly across social media platforms, it is rarely recognized as a cybercrime, even when it may be linked to offline hate crimes that typically involve physical violence. This paper aims to anticipate violent acts by analyzing online hate speech (hatred, toxicity, and ...

New school speech regulation as a regulatory strategy against hate speech on social media: The case of Germany’s NetzDG

September 15, 2024

A review of relevant empirical literature shows that many features of social media platforms actively promote or encourage hate speech. Key factors include algorithmic recommendations, which frequently promote hateful ideologies; social affordances which let users encourage or disseminate hate speech by others; anonymous, impersonal environments; and the absence of media ‘gatekeepers’. In mandating faster content ...

Investigating the Cross-Platform Behaviours of Online Hate Groups

September 12, 2024

This thesis aimed to address these limitations by developing a cross-platform analysis framework for online-hate researchers to gain a clearer understanding of the dynamics of the global hate ecosystem. More specifically, the designing of this framework involved examining the main functionalities of existing online-hate analysis frameworks, and the extent to which they address cross-platform hate. ...