Us and them: identifying cyber hate on Twitter across multiple protected characteristics
September 18, 2023
Hateful and antagonistic content published and propagated via the World Wide Web has the potential to cause harm and suffering on an individual basis, and lead to social tension and disorder beyond cyber space. Despite new legislation aimed at prosecuting those who misuse new forms of communication to post threatening, harassing, or grossly offensive language ...
Topic-Specific YouTube Crawling to Detect Online Radicalization
September 18, 2023
Online video sharing platforms such as YouTube contains several videos and users promoting hate and extremism. Due to low barrier to publication and anonymity, YouTube is misused as a platform by some users and communities to post negative videos disseminating hatred against a particular religion, country or person. We formulate the problem of identification of ...
Cyber Hate Speech on Twitter: An Application of Machine Classification and Statistical Modeling for Policy and Decision Making
September 18, 2023
The use of “Big Data” in policy and decision making is a current topic of debate. The 2013 murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich, London, UK led to an extensive public reaction on social media, providing the opportunity to study the spread of online hate speech (cyber hate) on Twitter. Human annotated Twitter data ...
Mechachal: Online Debates and Elections in Ethiopia
September 18, 2023
We are delighted to announce the launch of the final report of the Mechachal project, one of first academic studies to contextually examine how hate speech emerges and disseminates in social media. Focusing on Ethiopia, and in collaboration with Addis Ababa University, the research team examined thousands of comments made by Ethiopians on Facebook during ...
The Affinity Between Online and Offline Anti-Muslim Hate Crime: Dynamics and Impacts
September 18, 2023
Following the recent terrorist attacks in Paris and Tunisia in 2015, and in Woolwich, south-east London where British Army soldier Drummer Lee Rigby was murdered in 2013, there has seen a significant increase in anti-Muslim attacks. These incidents have occurred offline where mosques have been vandalized, Muslim women have had their hijab (headscarf) or niqab ...
Hate Crime and Bullying in the Age of Social Media
September 18, 2023
The All Wales Hate Crime Project (Williams & Tregidga 2013, 2014) highlighted the emerging problem of cyberhate and cyber bulling via social media through interviews with victims. Opportunities for online engagement have increased exponentially over the past two decades. In 1999 only 10 per cent of UK households had access to the Internet. The number ...
Grooming for Terror: The Internet and Young People
September 18, 2023
The use of the Internet to spawn hate sites and recruit advocates for hate began as early as the mid-1980s in bulletin boards, and the first acknowledged hate site was Stormfront, in the early 1990s. Since then hundreds of hate sites and other websites advocating terror have been developed, some with stated aims of recruiting ...
The Supremacy of Online White Supremacists – an Analysis of Online Discussions by White Supremacists
September 18, 2023
A content analysis was conducted on five different white supremacist online forums to observe the discourse and types of activities occurring within. In addition, web link analysis was conducted on the forums to identify the presence of external links being posted and discussed by members. We found that members used the forums primarily for information ...
“Real Men Don’t Hate Women”: Twitter Rape Threats and Group Identity
September 18, 2023
On 24th July 2013, feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez’s petition to the Bank of England to have Elizabeth Fry’s image on the UK’s £5 note replaced with the image of another woman was successful. The petition challenged the Bank of England’s original plan to replace Fry with Winston Churchill, which would have meant that no woman ...