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Understanding and Automating Counterspeech

Wed 29 September 2021

Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH)

A programme for this event can be found on http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/29885.

Online hate speech and the spread of misinformation continue to increase, notably exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic and recurring national shutdowns. According to a review published by The Alan Turing Institute in 2019, between 30-40% of people in the UK have witnessed harmful content and 10-20% have personally experienced abuse online. Moreover, recent statistics released by the government on hate crime show that the number of hate crimes in England and Wales has increased steadily over the last six years. Research suggests that there is a link between online hate speech and real-life acts of discrimination and violence. And while awareness of the problem increases on societal as well as governmental and corporate levels, current approaches are still insufficient as the spread of hate speech and disinformation continues. Most social media platforms still follow a mainly reactive approach to harmful content and even if more content were deleted, it remains questionable whether removal or blocking is the best way to engage with this problem. At the same time, companies like Apple, Microsoft and Amazon report an increasing amount of verbal abuse directed at their virtual personal assistants Siri, Cortana and Alexa. This has equally brought into question how voice agents should counter this form of toxic communication.

An increasing body of research from different fields such as linguistics, philosophy of language, media and communication studies, law and policy, computer science and information engineering has been analysing the role and functions of counterspeech as a means of successfully combatting hate speech, verbal abuse and misinformation.

This workshop brings together experts from different fields in academia (philosophy of language, sociology, law, media and communication studies, peacebuilding and conflict studies, computer science), political activism and industry to further the conversation and address some of the most pressing questions as well as computational approaches to counterspeech.

Cost: free