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The advent of the World Wide Web created new digital worlds consisting of networked blogs, websites, chatrooms and forums for every topic under the sun (or in the shadows). An unintended side effect of such digital communities is that they have enabled individuals with extreme beliefs to find others to validate their grievances and encourage them to action. One of the largest and most notable of these communities is known as the ‘Manosphere’, an anti-women digital world that foments extreme misogyny, dehumanising women and, at its deepest levels, advocating for violence against all things feminist. This chapter will lay out the contours of the Manosphere and illuminate the major threats arising from this online space.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

Thought-provoking and timely, this book addresses the increasingly widespread issue of online political hatred in Europe. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it examines both the contributions of new technologies, in particular social networks, to the rise of this phenomenon, and the legal and political contexts in which it is taking place. Giovanni Ziccardi also evaluates possible remedies for the situation, including both legal and technological solutions, and outlines the potential for a unified European framework to counter the spread of hatred online.

Content regulation and censorship of social media platforms is increasingly discussed by governments and the platforms themselves. To date, there has been little data-driven analysis of the effects of regulated content deemed inappropriate on online user behavior. We therefore compared Twitter — a popular social media platform that occasionally removes content in violation of its Terms of Service — to Gab — a platform that markets itself as completely unregulated. Launched in mid 2016, Gab is, in practice, dominated by individuals who associate with the “alt right” political movement in the United States. Despite its billing as “The Free Speech Social Network,” Gab users display more extreme social hierarchy and elitism when compared to Twitter. Although the framing of the site welcomes all people, Gab users’ content is more homogeneous, preferentially sharing material from sites traditionally associated with the extremes of American political discourse, especially the far right. Furthermore, many of these sites are associated with state-sponsored propaganda from foreign governments. Finally, we discovered a significant presence of German language posts on Gab, with several topics focusing on German domestic politics, yet sharing significant amounts of content from U.S. and Russian sources. These results indicate possible emergent linkages between domestic politics in European and American far right political movements. Implications for regulation of social media platforms are discussed.

In recent years, the increasing propagation of hate speech on social media and the urgent need for effective counter-measures have drawn significant investment from governments, companies, and empirical research. Despite a large number of emerging scientific studies to address the problem, a major limitation of existing work is the lack of comparative evaluations, which makes it difficult to assess the contribution of individual works. This paper introduces a new method based on a deep neural network combining convolutional and gated recurrent networks. We conduct an extensive evaluation of the method against several baselines and state of the art on the largest collection of publicly available Twitter datasets to date, and show that compared to previously reported results on these datasets, our proposed method is able to capture both word sequence and order information in short texts, and it sets new benchmark by outperforming on 6 out of 7 datasets by between 1 and 13% in F1. We also extend the existing dataset collection on this task by creating a new dataset covering different topics.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.