Countering Hatred with AI

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At the Dangerous Speech Project, we have conducted ground-breaking research on people - thousands of them - who respond constructively to online hatred. 

So please join our co-hosts Dave Willner of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center and Justin Hendrix of Tech Policy Press for an important webinar on AI and Counterspeech, May 7, 1:00 to 1:45 EDT. We will explain the work we briefly described in our recent Tech Policy Press piece Can AI Save Democracy? No, It's Not Funny Enough, and chart an effective way forward. 

We will share what our research shows about how to build AI tools to do urgently needed counterspeech and/or help counterspeakers to do it. We will take a deep dive into understanding what online speakers want and need and what will work without backfiring.

We are delighted to feature Alena Helgeson who is a highly experienced counterspeaker, and Cathy Buerger and Maarten Sap, researchers who have been working keenly on the topic. We plan for this to be highly interactive so please come with your questions, and ideas.

Speakers

Alena Helgeson

Alena Helgeson (she/her) is a Chinese Canadian raised in rural Alberta. She earned her Bachelor of Education from the University of Alberta and has worked in healthcare for two decades.In 2018, after observing the amount of vitriol towards Indigenous communities on social media, she founded a Canadian counterspeaking group under the umbrella of #iamhereinternational.  In 2021 the grassroots group registered as a nonprofit organization, #WeAreHereCanada, to expand their reach and start taking action beyond the digital sphere, such as with the Hate Has No Home Here Sign Campaign. The #WeAreHereCanada community continues to encourage others to speak out against hate, amplify marginalized voices and create supportive spaces for those working towards a compassionate, just and equitable society.

Cathy Buerger

Cathy Buerger is the Director of Research at the Dangerous Speech Project where she studies therelationship between speech and intergroup violence as well as civil society responses to dangerous and hateful speech online. Her ethnographic research has documented efforts to advance peace, equality, and human rights in Sweden, Ghana, and the United States, and her work has appeared in a variety of publications including the Social Media + Society, the Journal of Human Rights Practice, Human Rights Quarterly, and Peace and Conflict Studies. She is a Research Affiliate of UConn’s Economic and Social Rights Research Group and Managing Editor of the Journal of Human Rights. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Connecticut.

Maarten Sap

Maarten Sap is an assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Department (CMU LTI), and a part-time research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2). His research focuses on making NLP systems socially intelligent, and understanding social inequality and bias in language. He has presented his work in top-tier NLP and AI conferences, receiving best or outstanding paper awards at EMNLP 2023, ACL 2023, FAccT 2023, and WeCNLP 2020, as well as a best short paper nomination at ACL 2019. Additionally, he and his team won the inaugural 2017 Amazon Alexa Prize, a social chatbot competition. His research has been covered in the press, including the New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, Vox, and more. Before joining CMU, he was a postdoc/young investigator at the AI2 on project MOSAIC. He received his PhD from the University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering where he was advised by Yejin Choi and Noah Smith.

Hosts

Dave Willner

Dave Willner began working in Trust & Safety in 2008, when where he joined Facebook’s first team of moderators. He went on to write the company's first systematic content policies, and build the team that maintains those rules to this day. After leaving Facebook in 2013, he created and ran Airbnb's Community Policy Team, then joined OpenAI as the company’s first Head of Trust and Safety. He now works as an advisor for AI companies and as a non-resident fellow at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center.

Justin Hendrix

Justin Hendrix is CEO and Editor of Tech Policy Press, a new nonprofit media venture concerned with the intersection of technology and democracy. Previously, he was Executive Director of NYC Media Lab. He spent over a decade at The Economist in roles including Vice President, Business Development & Innovation. He is an associate research scientist and adjunct professor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

Susan Benesch

Susan Benesch is the founder and Executive Director of the Dangerous Speech Project, which studies speech that can inspire violence and works to find ways to prevent that violence, without infringing on freedom of expression. To that end, she conducts research on methods to diminish harmful speech online, or the harm itself. Susan is also Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

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