Assessing the Extent and Types of Hate Speech in Fringe Communities: A Case Study of Alt-Right Communities on 8chan, 4chan, and Reddit
September 18, 2023
Recent right-wing extremist terrorists were active in online fringe communities connected to the alt-right movement. Although these are commonly considered as distinctly hateful, racist, and misogynistic, the prevalence of hate speech in these communities has not been comprehensively investigated yet, particularly regarding more implicit and covert forms of hate. This study exploratively investigates the extent, ...
The Online Intersection among Islamophobia, Populism, and Hate Speech: An Italian Perspective
September 18, 2023
Online radical Islam is a topic widely studied by scholars and notoriously discussed among non- experts as well (; ; ). Because of its intrinsic characteristics (i.e. accessibility, anonymity, or users’ identity dissimulation), the internet has always been a useful tool for propagandists of Islamic fundamentalism (; ; ). However, in the last decade, studies ...
Chapter 10: On free public communication and terrorism online
September 18, 2023
The basic issue that this chapter examines is how we set morally justifiable limits on what people say online, with a specific focus on speech acts related to terrorism. The chapter takes as one of its foundational assumptions that there are situations in which free speech, while an important and potentially fundamental right, can be ...
Online Hate and Zeitgeist of Fear: A Five-Country Longitudinal Analysis of Hate Exposure and Fear of Terrorism After the Paris Terrorist Attacks in 2015
September 18, 2023
Acts of terror lead to both a rise of an extended sense of fear that goes beyond the physical location of the attacks and to increased expressions of online hate. In this longitudinal study, we analyzed dynamics between the exposure to online hate and the fear of terrorism after the Paris attacks in November 13, ...
Operating with impunity: legal review
September 18, 2023
The independent Commission for Countering Extremism has published a legal review, to examine whether existing legislation adequately deals with hateful extremism. ...
Understanding online hate: VSP Regulation and the broader context
September 18, 2023
This report aims to contribute to our understanding of online hate in the context of the requirements of the revised Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) for Video Sharing Platforms (VSPs) to protect the general public from incitement to hatred or violence. However, online hate is complex and it can only be fully understood by considering ...
GAFAM and Hate Content Moderation: Deplatforming and Deleting the Alt-right
September 18, 2023
Purpose – This chapter demonstrates the power that Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (or the “GAFAM”) exercise over platforms within society, highlights the alt-right’s use of GAFAM sites and services as a platform for hate, and examines GAFAM’s establishment and use of hate content moderation apparatuses to de-platform alt-right users and delete hate content. ...
“Short is the Road that Leads from Fear to Hate”: Fear Speech in Indian WhatsApp Groups
September 18, 2023
WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app in the world. Due to its popularity, WhatsApp has become a powerful and cheap tool for political campaigning being widely used during the 2019 Indian general election, where it was used to connect to the voters on a large scale. Along with the campaigning, there have been reports ...
Governing Hate: Facebook and Digital Racism
September 18, 2023
This article is concerned with identifying the ideological and techno-material parameters that inform Facebook’s approach to racism and racist contents. The analysis aims to contribute to studies of digital racism by showing Facebook’s ideological position on racism and identifying its implications. To understand Facebook’s approach to racism, the article deconstructs its governance structures, locating racism ...
The Anti-Hate Brigade: How a Group of Thousands Responds Collectively to Online Vitriol
September 18, 2023
#jagärhar is by far the largest and best-organized collective effort to respond directly to hatred online, anywhere in the world, as far as we know. It is also one of only two civil society efforts against hatred online to have been replicated in numerous other countries. In this detailed account of its efforts– the first ...