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Online hate speech erupts after controversial events, including against unrelated groups

2023-01-26T11:24:13.888Z


Experts warn of the dangers of toxicity emerging from platforms without moderation: "We don't know what's going on there"


What happens on the street explodes on the networks and a study now reveals a complex relationship between real-life events and incitement to hatred on the Internet.

By analyzing 1,150 extremist communities on six social networks, the researchers identified, for example, a spike in the number of hate posts during protests by the movement.

Black Lives Matter (black lives matter), from the murder of the African-American George Floyd at the hands of the police.

But what is most notable is that not only the number of racist offenses skyrocketed, but also those focused on gender identity and sexual orientation, themes that have little connection with the protests framed above all by racial issues.

The results show that racism is followed by apparently unrelated insults, although it is not clear why.

Yonatan Lupu, a professor at George Washington University and co-author of the study published today in the magazine

Plos One

, explains to EL PAÍS that after an event, such as demonstrations or elections, there is a reaction that begins on non-moderated platforms and "very quickly begins to appear” in the most popular social networks.

“What happens on 4Chan [an internet forum] doesn't stay on 4Chan.

It is very clear that it is transferred to Facebook, Twitter and others.

It is a really serious problem, because the content reaches a much wider audience and potentially helps extremists to radicalize people who were not yet radical ”, he underlines.

Following the US elections in November 2020, there were several waves of extremist posts on social media: homophobic slurs against certain politicians increased, and Vice President Kamala Harris was the target of sexist slurs.

But it was after Floyd's death, on May 25, 2020, that there was an uptick: the rate of racial hate speech rose 250% in early June and, by the end of the year, was still double what it had been. It had been before this event.

Most surprising, according to the authors, is that the other types of hate speech also increased dramatically, especially those related to identity and sexual orientation (75%), ethnicity and nationalism (60%), and gender (50%).

The role of the media

The media play a particularly important role because they create visibility for these events and thereby create a kind of tone for extremist communities.

“Part of the reason we saw such a huge increase in hate speech during the Black Lives Matter protests is because they received a lot of media attention.

That doesn't mean he shouldn't have received it, it's not the responsibility of journalists to prevent this kind of thing.

In any case, it is a duty of the platforms, but since some of them are not moderated, they are not interested in doing so”, Lupu develops.

The team of researchers, from George Washington University

and Google, combined manual and automated methods to analyze 59 million posts in communities and groups across six social networks: Facebook, Instagram, VKontakte, considered more moderate, albeit to different degrees, and Gab, Telegram and 4Chan, with little moderation, between June 2019 and December 2020. Researchers looked at and coded nearly 20,000 posts to classify seven categories of discrimination — homophobic, racist, religious, ethnic, sexist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic — under U.S. hate crime and hate speech provisions. , or if the content supported or promoted fascist ideologies or extreme nationalism.

From this manual analysis, they trained the algorithm to differentiate whether a certain piece of content was an insult or an argument.

Moderation on the most popular platforms is a double-edged sword.

They are essential and they have to exist, but if the insulters are kicked out due to more moderation of content, they have other places to go and they will find a place where they can say everything, without any retaliation, and that would intensify their radicalization and the harassment.

Opacity at the origin

The study has not tracked users, so there is "no direct evidence" of how this migration occurs from more moderate social networks, such as Facebook, to those that are less restrictive, such as Telegram.

Even so, previous investigations carried out by the Lupu team have revealed some strategies to capture an audience and avoid moderation.

“When the extremists are still on conventional platforms, they create a kind of mirror with Telegram or Gab and post saying 'if they remove us from here, we will move there,'” says the professor of political science.

Sílvia Majó-Vázquez, a postdoctoral researcher at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, agrees that the scientific community lacks concrete data on the consequences of non-moderated platforms on the formation of public opinion and that it should be pay more attention to them.

“We know that they move from open to closed platforms to mobilize human capital, to coordinate protest and counter-protest activities.

But we don't know what's going on there.

There are some signs that tell us, but we cannot quantify because we do not have the data or access to them”, explains the expert.

Despite the fact that moderated platforms are forced to act immediately to remove content in certain periods of time, Majó-Vázquez acknowledges that it is difficult to identify hate speech through automatic mechanisms.

“In toxic language there are many elements of sarcasm, of irony, which transcends literal language.

This makes it more difficult to detect it, therefore, to take action by the platforms.

That doesn't mean they don't have homework to do,” she says.

Should governments get more involved in regulating content?

Yonatan Lupu argues that it is not an easy answer.

While hate speech is extremely worrying, it could also be just as dangerous if governments get too involved in censoring content.

"Unfortunately, I'm not sure what the right balance is," concludes the professor.

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Source: elparis

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