June 06,2024
The Dangerous Speech Project and the India Hate Lab have been studying the spread of hateful, inflammatory rhetoric during this year’s elections in the United States and in India. The Indian election, just completed, has taught us quite a bit about such content, and ways to undermine it. Please join the DSP’s Cathy Buerger and Susan Benesch, India Hate Lab’s Raqib Hameed Naik, and distinguished Indian journalist Parth M.N., to listen and ask questions.
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May 22,2024
“As we remember the Isla Vista victims on the 10-year anniversary of their murders,” writes Alex DiBranco, “it is imperative that we give serious attention to the continued risks of misogynist ideology, speech, and violence.”
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May 13,2024
The urgent need for legal action against Prime Minister Modi’s hate speech is spurred by the impending finish of India’s election.
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February 29,2024
Join us on Wednesday, April 24th, at 3 p.m. at Rutgers University – Camden as Executive Director Susan Benesch discusses “Dangerous Speech and What We Can Do About It.”
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January 17,2024
As the U.S. election approaches, there is a growing possibility of intergroup violence along with an increase in dangerous and hateful speech. How can we best respond as peacebuilders? In this hour-long workshop hosted by Peace Through Action USA, Director of Research Cathy Buerger will discuss one possible response to online hatred – counterspeech.
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January 03,2024
Director of Research Cathy Buerger and Professor Joshua Garland discuss the importance of research collaborations like their project on AI and counterspeech.
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January 03,2024
The Dangerous Speech Project has written a Toolkit on Using Counterspeech to Tackle Online Hate Speech in collaboration with the Future of Free Speech project, as a resource for learning effective counterspeech strategies.
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November 20,2023
In response to Elon Musk’s recent endorsement of antisemitic dangerous speech, major companies are enacting their own counterspeech strategy: pulling their advertising dollars from X.
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November 06,2023
Criticism of Facebook’s role in the Rohingya genocide largely focuses on anti-Rohingya speech. But content targeting and shaming members of the in-group – like calling people traitors for showing empathy for the Rohingya – also played a significant role.
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June 16,2021
People have been trying to understand the catalysts of human behavior, especially violent behavior, for thousands of years. In this review, we focus on how speech, especially public, often online speech, can inspire civilians of one group to attack civilians of another or create an atmosphere in which such violence is encouraged.
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May 19,2020
UNESCO on how education can counter hate and dangerous speech, featuring DSP Executive Director Susan Benesch
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March 19,2020
Author Salil Tripathi examines the distinction between hate speech and dangerous speech in the context of elections in Delhi, India.
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June 18,2019
Should you respond directly to hatred online? And if so, how should you do it? These are just a few of the questions that staff at the Dangerous Speech Project (DSP) discussed with an audience at RightsCon last week. DSP staff were joined by Logan Smith, creator of @YesYoureRacist.
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June 13,2019
In his new book, Speech Police, David Kaye argues that online content needs to be regulated in a fair, consistent way – not in reactive, confusing fits and starts. In the same week as the book’s release, YouTube showed us why he’s right.
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April 06,2019
April 2019 marks the 25th anniversary of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. One of its lasting lessons for the world is that words matter, and we must monitor and resist Dangerous Speech.
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April 06,2019
Australia’s Parliament rushed to pass a law which would punish social media companies who do not “expeditiously” remove “violent material” from their platforms – a move which could encourage increased censorship.
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October 26,2018
The winner of Brazil’s 2018 presidential election has a long history of Dangerous Speech, as well as calls to violence against black and indigenous people, LGBTQ people, and women.
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August 10,2018
In Nigeria, conflicts driven by Dangerous Speech and legitimate grievances have raised concerns that 2019 elections may spark mass violence.
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July 12,2018
The window of acceptable politics in America has widened to include what was once unthinkable. White supremacists have taken advantage across the country.
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January 24,2018
This six-minute introductory video explains Dangerous Speech and its five elements, with historical and contemporary examples from around the world.
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December 08,2016
This essay seeks to review some of the various attempts to define hate speech, and pull from them a series…
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December 08,2016
Hate speech is a serious concern in the Republic of India. However, Indian law does not use the phrase “hate…
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October 31,2016
This report on Internet hate speech, hate speech law, and efforts to diminish it synthesizes research and case studies from four countries. It was published by the European project BRICkS Against Hate Speech.
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July 26,2016
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.
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July 22,2016
In this short report, the Media Diversity Institute offers advice on how to respond to hate speech on Twitter. Tips include: don’t be abusive, build a narrative, and think about your objectives.
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June 09,2015
This UNESCO report provides an overview of hate speech online and studies methods that have been used to counter and…
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September 01,2014
“The growth of online hate speech in Sri Lanka does not guarantee another pogrom. It does however pose a range of other challenges to government and governance around social, ethnic, cultural and religious co-existence, diversity and, ultimately, to the very core of debates around how we see and organise ourselves post-war.” Full report available in English and Sinhala; executive summary also available in Tamil.
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July 04,2014
State of the World’s Minorities and Indigenous Peoples 2014, Minority Rights Group International, 2014.
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February 23,2013
This document has been replaced by “Dangerous Speech: A Practical Guide,” released in December 2018. It is preserved here for…
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