The Social Impact of Automatic Hate Speech Detection

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• Stefanie Ullmann, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Centre for Humanities and Social Change
• Tuesday 22 October 2019, 13:10-14:00
• The Richard King Room, Darwin College.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Nanna K L Kaalund.

This talk has been canceled/deleted

If you have a question about this talk, please contact nklk2@cam.ac.uk or aa974@hermes.cam.ac.uk

In this talk, I explore quarantining as a more ethical method for delimiting the spread of Hate Speech via online social media platforms. Currently, companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google generally respond reactively to such material: offensive messages that have already been posted are reviewed by human moderators if complaints from users are received. The offensive posts are only subsequently removed if the complaints are upheld; therefore, they still cause the recipients psychological harm. In addition, this approach has frequently been criticised for delimiting freedom of expression, since it requires the service providers to elaborate and implement censorship regimes. In the last few years, an emerging generation of automatic Hate Speech detection systems has started to offer new strategies for dealing with this particular kind of offensive online material. Anticipating the future efficacy of such systems, the present article advocates an approach to online Hate Speech detection that is analogous to the quarantining of malicious computer software. If a given post is automatically classified as being harmful in a reliable manner, then it can be temporarily quarantined, and the direct recipients can receive an alert, which protects them from the harmful content in the first instance. The quarantining framework is an example of more ethical online safety technology that can be extended to the handling of Hate Speech. Crucially, it provides flexible options for obtaining a more justifiable balance between freedom of expression and appropriate censorship.

This talk is part of the Darwin College Humanities and Social Sciences Seminars series.

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