Cyberhate: A review and content analysis of intervention strategies
September 18, 2023
This paper presents a review of intervention programmes against cyberhate. Over the last decade, the preoccupation over the use of electronic means of communication as a tool to convey hate, racist and xenophobic contents rose tremendously. NGOs, legal professionals, private companies, and civil society have developed interventions but little is known about their impact. For ...
All You Need Is “Love”: Evading Hate Speech Detection
September 18, 2023
With the spread of social networks and their unfortunate use for hate speech, automatic detection of the latter has become a pressing problem. In this paper, we reproduce seven state-of-the-art hate speech detection models from prior work, and show that they perform well only when tested on the same type of data they were trained ...
Expressing and Challenging Racist Discourse on Facebook: How Social Media Weaken the “Spiral of Silence” Theory
September 18, 2023
This article examines the discursive practices of Facebook users who use the platform to express racist views. We analyzed 51,991 public comments posted to 119 news stories about race, racism, or ethnicity on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News Facebook page. We examined whether users who hold racist viewpoints (the vocal minority) are less likely to ...
Perceived Societal Fear and Cyberhate after the November 2015 Paris Terrorist Attacks
September 18, 2023
Fear is one of the negative outcomes of terrorist attacks. Currently, there is a need to understand how societal fear and fear of terrorism might be shaped and induced by social-media discussions. This study analyzed how exposure to cyberhate was associated with perceived societal fear after the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks. Demographically balanced data ...
Germany’s NetzDG: A key test for combatting online hate
September 18, 2023
Germany’s Network Enforcement Act, or NetzDG law represents a key test for combatting hate speech on the internet. Under the law, which came into effect on January 1, 2018, online platforms face fines of up to €50 million for systemic failure to delete illegal content. Supporters see the legislation as a necessary and efficient response ...
The Ungovernability of Digital Hate Culture
September 18, 2023
Social media and the Internet play an important role in the proliferation of hateful and extreme speech. Looking to contemporary networks of digitally mediated extreme right-wing communication, this essay explores the form, dynamics, and potential governance of digital hate culture. It focuses on the cultural practices and imagination present in the networks of digital hate ...
Backgrounds, Experiences and Responses to Online Hate Speech: A Comparative Cross-Country Analysis
September 18, 2023
International- and EU-institutions are paying increasing attention to the phenomenon of online hate speech and acknowledge this as a growing problem across and beyond Europe. In this regard, the 2015 ECRI report highlights online hate speech as one of the main trends of the previous year, emphasising that “hate speech through social media is rapidly ...
Horizons of Hate: A Comparative Approach to Social Media Hate Speech
September 18, 2023
A comparative approach to social media hate speech. This study compares a Finnish anti-refugee and anti-immigration Facebook group criticised for hate speech and links to the extreme right, with a Finnish anti-racist Facebook group that opposed it, alongside a Facebook group aimed at dialogue between the two. A critical-comparative analysis of social media hate speech ...
Loving Hate, Anti-Muslim Extremism, Radical Islamism, and the Spiral of Polarization
September 18, 2023
This report focuses on the interactional dynamics between anti-Muslim extremists and radical Islamists in Germany and beyond. It reveals ideological underpinnings, approaches to mobilization and communication patterns, which all prove to be analogous on both sides, and it places emphasis on the reciprocity of hate that may serve to intensify processes of individual and group ...
Taking North American White Supremacist Groups Seriously: The Scope and Challenge of Hate Speech on the Internet
September 18, 2023
This article aims to address two questions: how does hate speech manifest on North American white supremacist websites; and is there a connection between online hate speech and hate crime? Firstly, hate speech is defined and the research methodology upon which the article is based is explained. The ways that ‘hate’ groups utilize the Internet ...