[Air-L] pre-AoIR workshop: Less Hate in Politics! Machine Learning and Interventions to Mitigate Online Hate Speech (Oct 18)

[Salla-M Laaksonen (Ms)]

If heading to AoIR 2017, consider also joining our preconference on hate 
speech recognition and prevention!


an AoIR 2017 Preconference workshop:

* * *
Less Hate in Politics! Machine Learning and Interventions as Tools to 
Mitigate Online Hate Speech in Political Campaigns
* * *

Oct 18th, 9 am - 12:30 pm
Dorpat Convention Centre, Tartu, Estonia


Discriminating, hateful speech online, often targeting specific groups 
and minorities, has become a pressing problem in the societies. Hateful 
speech is a form of verbal violence that creates enemities, silences 
debates, and marginalizes individuals and groups from participation online.

What is challenging is that ‘hate speech’ has come to mean a variety of 
speech acts and other ill-behaviours online, ranging from penal criminal 
acts to speech which is uncivil and disturbing, but yet to be tolerated. 
This definitional difficulty is further abused in claims that any 
limitations of hate speech endanger people’s right to freedom of expression.

Hate speech has been criminalized in many countries and major Internet 
companies also engage in efforts to limit it. While many social media 
platforms allow users to flag content as hate speech for moderation 
purposes, no official follow-up actions take place. Furthermore, the 
automatic identification of hate speech is limited by lacking tools.


* Pre-conference workshop aim and content *

The aim of the workshop is to facilitate the development of tools and 
processes how the academic community could run interventions which aim 
to decrease the toxicity in the online space.

We will provide participants a kick-start with computational tools for 
hate speech recognition. We will also discuss and reflect the challenges 
of such interventions and examine the opportunities and problems of 
deploying such systems. Our own experiences – which we reflect in the 
workshop – emerge from a project where the social media activity of 
candidates was monitored during the Finnish municipal election campaigns 
in April 2017.

The workshop will follow an interactive style using both online and 
offline tools to facilitate discussion.


More details on the AoIR website:
https://aoir.org/aoir2017/preconworkshop/#LHP

Registration for the preconference is done via the main conference 
registration form.



--
Salla-M Laaksonen // @jahapaula
PhD Researcher
Communication Research Centre CRC
& Consumer Society Research Centre KTK
Faculty of Social Sciences
P.O. Box 54, 00014 University of Helsinki
tel. +358 50 415 6576
salla.laaksonen at helsinki.fi
http://blogs.helsinki.fi/smlaakso