Stop Hate Speech - Countering Online Hate in Switzerland

We are excited to announce that we will have our first in-person community event this year in September! So save the date! We will also provide a ZOOM link in case you want to attend the event online.

Overview
We are delighted to have Karsten Donnay from the the University of Zurich to give us a talk on his research on using machine learning to stop hate speech.

About the talk
Public debate is increasingly taking place on the internet, on social media platforms but also on newspaper forums. This shift to the digital sphere has been plagued by a steep rise in hate speech, often disproportionately targeting women, teenagers and members of minority groups. Experiencing hate online has severe negative, emotional, mental and even physical consequences for those targeted. It also more broadly affects how all of us interact online by deteriorating norms and shifting which attitudes and behaviors are deemed acceptable. Next to interventions from platforms providers, active counter speech by other users is a powerful alternative approach to counter online hate. In this talk, I present our joint work with colleagues at UZH and ETH in support of the “Stop Hate Speech” project of our NGO-partner alliance F. We leverage a unique, large new dataset of annotated newspaper comments and tweets paired with state-of-the-art machine learning to enable robust detection of online hate speech in Switzerland. This enables timely counterspeech at scale and we then systematically evaluate the efficacy of different counter speech strategies using randomized real-world interventions.

About the Speaker
Karsten Donnay is Assistant Professor of Political Behavior and Digital Media in the Department of Political Science at the University of Zurich and part of the university's Digital Society Initiative as a DSI-Professor. In his research, Karsten Donnay combines a substantive interest in political science with the development and refinement of quantitative methodologies for social science research. In the past years, the main focus of his research has been on understanding the influence of new digital (online) media for political behavior.

About the Venue
Rämistrasse 69, in the offices of the DSI, room SOC-E-010 (see https://www.plaene.uzh.ch/SOC).
ZOOM link: https://unil.zoom.us/j/9572942607