Online Library

This small-scale study brings attention to the way the news media cover the enabling role of computer technology and social media in coalescing online communities focused on the hatred of women and the promotion of violence. While that aggression is ultimately and typically carried out against both women and men, it is specifically misogyny which underlies it. The way that the broader public receives information about incels – involuntary celebates with misogynistic and often violent tendencies – and their atrocities is through the news media, both traditional and internet. This study complements related research on misogynistic language used by social media sites like Reddit by examining the news media’s language in coverage of incels’ behavior associated with sexual aggression. The research applies qualitative procedures (textual analysis) and a critical feminist framework to identify the gender relations associated with incels online in news for the years 2018 and 2019.

This human rights due diligence exercise reviews the impact of Meta’s policies and activities during the May 2021 crisis in Israel and Palestine. The primary purpose is to provide Meta with prioritized, action-oriented, and decision-useful recommendations for policies and practices to fulfill Meta’s commitments under its Corporate Human Rights Policy and responsibilities under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs).

VOX-Pol Blog post.

In this paper we use methods of social network analysis to examine the inter-organizational structure of the white supremacist movement. Treating links between Internet websites as ties of affinity, communication, or potential coordination, we investigate the structural properties of connections among white supremacist groups. White supremacism appears to be a relatively decentralized movement with multiple centers of influence, but without sharp cleavages between factions. Interorganizational links are stronger among groups with a special interest in mutual affirmation of their intellectual legitimacy (Holocaust revisionists) or cultural identity (racist skinheads) and weaker among groups that compete for members (political parties) or customers (commercial enterprises). The network is relatively isolated from both mainstream conservatives and other extremist groups. Christian Identity theology appears ineffective as a unifying creed of the movement, while Nazi sympathies are pervasive. Recruitment is facilitated by links between youth and adult organizations and by the propaganda efforts of more covertly racist groups. Links connect groups in many countries, suggesting the potential of the Internet to facilitate a whitesupremacist “cyber-community” that transcends regional and national boundaries.

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 was collected in the immediate aftermath of Rigby’s murder to train and test a supervised machine learning text classifier that distinguishes between hateful and/or antagonistic responses with a focus on race, ethnicity, or religion; and more general responses. Classification features were derived from the content of each tweet, including grammatical dependencies between words to recognize “othering” phrases, incitement to respond with antagonistic action, and claims of well-founded or justified discrimination against social groups. The results of the classifier were optimal using a combination of probabilistic, rule-based, and spatial-based classifiers with a voted ensemble meta-classifier. We demonstrate how the results of the classifier can be robustly utilized in a statistical model used to forecast the likely spread of cyber hate in a sample of Twitter data. The applications to policy and decision making are discussed.