As the United States reaches the end of a campaign season marred by increasing levels of disinformation and dangerous speech – and unprecedented fears of election-related violence – it’s time to start thinking about the future. In this paper, Cathy Buerger and Tonei Glavinic share new research about how countries around the world have taken on the challenge of harmful speech in campaigns, and offer ideas about how these approaches could be adapted for use in the United States.
Read MoreThis guide – updated for 2019 – provides an in-depth exploration of dangerous speech and how to identify it, dangerous speech on the internet, and some promising efforts to reduce the harmful effects of speech.
Read MoreThis paper presents seven proposals for how internet companies can more effectively address harmful content on their platforms, protect freedom of expression, and provide a better experience for their users.
Read MoreAutomated content moderation is a temporary, imperfect emergency response. Companies and governments must ensure that it does not become the new status quo.
Read MoreEvery day, internet users encounter hateful and dangerous speech online, and some of them choose to respond directly in order to refute or undermine it. We call this counterspeech. Only a few studies have attempted to measure the effectiveness of counterspeech directly, and as far as we know, this is the first review of relevant literature.
Read MoreMedium
DSP Executive Director Susan Benesch, J. Nathan Matias of Princeton University, and several other independent researchers launched a collaborative study with Twitter to test whether awareness of the rules affects user behavior.
Read MoreThis six-minute introductory video explains Dangerous Speech and its five elements, with historical and contemporary examples from around the world.
Read MoreProceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
A study of conversations on Twitter found that some arguments between strangers led to favorable change in discourse and even in attitudes. The authors propose that such exchanges can be usefully distinguished according to whether individuals or groups take part on each side, since the opportunity for a constructive exchange of views seems to vary accordingly.
Read MoreThis guide offers recommendations for those who wish to engage in counterspeech online, based on the findings of our two year study of hateful speech and counterspeech on Twitter.
Read MoreThis report from our two year study of hateful speech and counterspeech on Twitter reviews existing literature on counterspeech, examines cases of counterspeech through the vector in which it was delivered, and develops a taxonomy of counterspeech strategies.
Read MoreFirst Workshop on Text Analytics for Cybersecurity and Online Safety
Online social platforms are beset with hateful speech – content that expresses hatred for a person or group of people. Such content can frighten, intimidate, or silence platform users, and some of it can inspire other users to commit violence. Despite widespread recognition of the problems posed by such content, reliable solutions even for detecting hateful speech are lacking. In the present work, we establish why keyword-based methods are insufficient for detection. We then propose an approach to detecting hateful speech that uses content produced by self-identifying hateful communities as training data. Our approach bypasses the expensive annotation process often required to train keyword systems and performs well across several established platforms, making substantial improvements over current state-of-the-art approaches.
Read MoreGenocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal
This paper draws together the authors’ work on dangerous speech and the ideological dynamics of mass atrocities by offering a new integrated model to help identify the sorts of speech and ideology that raise the risk of atrocities and genocides.
Read MoreReligion and Human Rights, An International Journal
This comment examines the tension between freedom of expression and freedom of religion by embedding the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in a wider, century-old European tradition of publications mocking religion, including Christianity. It describes, and draws lessons from, the 19th century blasphemy case against the British Freethinker newspaper, whose “technique of offense” was similar to that of Charlie Hebdo. Finally, the comment tackles the problem of violent response to text or images that mock religion, pointing out that malicious intermediaries often carry such messages between social groups or across national borders—greatly escalating the risk of violence.
Read MoreSusan Benesch reviews efforts to counter hateful speech online in the Berkman Center for Internet and Society’s report Internet Monitor…
Read MoreState of the World's Minorities 2014
State of the World’s Minorities and Indigenous Peoples 2014, Minority Rights Group International, 2014.
Read MoreIn this video, Dangerous Speech Project director Susan Benesch discusses methods of countering Dangerous Speech in online social spaces and research that has been conducted to test those methods.
Read MoreUS Holocaust Memorial Museum, February 11, 2014
Read MoreWith Michael Abramowitz. Wall Street Journal, December 18, 2013.
Read MoreThe Center for Global Communication Studies at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication conducted an evaluation of the Vioja Mahakamani media intervention, a partnership between the Dangerous Speech Project and Media Focus on Africa.
Read MoreThis document has been replaced by “Dangerous Speech: A Practical Guide,” released in December 2018. It is preserved here for…
Read More“It’s time for Internet giants to explain when censorship is and isn’t OK.” With Rebecca MacKinnon.
Read MoreDangerous Speech Project director Susan Benesch provides an overview of the distinction between hate speech and dangerous speech. April 20, 2012.
Read MorePeople are increasingly privy to communication that they would not have heard (or read or seen) in the past. This has significant implications for speech law and policy.
Read MoreThis book chapter describes existing case law on incitement to genocide, the challenges with identifying the cause of genocide, and offers the Dangerous Speech framework as an alternative approach.
Read MoreInflammatory speech – a common feature of elections – provides opportunities for preventing ethnic violence in the context of elections. However, this must be done carefully in order to preserve freedom of expression.
Read MoreThis paper analyzes incitement in international criminal law as well as in international human rights law, building an interpretive bridge between the two bodies of law; proposes a method for distinguishing incitement from other forms of hate speech; summarizes the jurisprudence on incitement to genocide; and describes a methodology for identifying speech that has a reasonable possibility of successfully inciting genocide, suggesting ways in which this framework may be adapted for distinguishing other forms of incitement.
Read MoreThis 2009 talk delivered by Susan Benesch at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Sudikoff Seminar examines the history of genocide in international law, and offers a proposed definition for the crime of incitement to genocide.
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