Civilized truths, hateful lies? Incivility and hate speech in false information – evidence from fact-checked statements in the US

Digital information settings may not only offer an opportunity structure for democratic deliberation, but also facilitate the occurrence of negative phenomena–such as incivility, hate speech and false information. Even though extant literature has provided theoretical arguments for a discursive affinity between false or deceptive information and uncivil speech, we lack empirical evidence on whether and how false information and incivility converge. Against this backdrop, we rely on an extensive content analysis of fact-checked statements in the US (N = 894) to assess to what extent and how different forms of incivility are present in different degrees of false information. Our main findings illustrate that partisan attacks, negativity, and hate speech are most likely to occur in false information that deviates furthest from reality. These findings help us to dissect different degrees of untruthfulness based on their content features: Disinformation (goal-directed deception) may be distinguished from misinformation (unintentionally misleading content) based on the centrality of hostility, partisan attacks, and hate speech in the former

Cloaked Facebook pages: Exploring fake Islamist propaganda in social media

This research analyses cloaked Facebook pages that are created to spread political propaganda by cloaking a user profile and imitating the identity of a political opponent in order to spark hateful and aggressive reactions. This inquiry is pursued through a multi-sited online ethnographic case study of Danish Facebook pages disguised as radical Islamist pages, which provoked racist and anti-Muslim reactions as well as negative sentiments towards refugees and immigrants in Denmark in general. Drawing on Jessie Daniels’ critical insights into cloaked websites, this research furthermore analyses the epistemological, methodological and conceptual challenges of online propaganda. It enhances our understanding of disinformation and propaganda in an increasingly interactive social media environment and contributes to a critical inquiry into social media and subversive politics

Exploring Narratives of Hate and Solidarity on Social Media: The Case of Yalitza Aparicio.

This article explores the hateful and solidarity-driven reactions directed towards Yalitza Aparicio, the first Indigenous woman nominated for Best Actress at the Oscar Awards (2019) for the film Roma (Cuarón 2018). Her fame and media presence in spaces where Indigenous women are not usually represented contributed to exposing everyday racism more explicitly in the public debate in Mexico.The comments of hate and solidarity towards Aparicio reveal the entanglement between the imaginaries of coloniality and Mexicanness that are emebbed in everyday life in Mexico. This case study exposes, on the one hand, the continuity and domination of these imaginaries through everyday narratives in a postdigital context. On the other hand, it also shows the reconfiguration of the (digital) imagined community in Mexico

The Debate Over the Efficacy of Federal Hate Crime Legislation: A Look at Arlen Specter’s Senatorial Efforts and its Legacy

Bias-motivated violence is considered especially heinous in the United States of America. This research examines the Federal legislation that cements that value into law. Hate crimes are criminal acts where the target was specifically chosen because of their race, sexual orientation, gender expression, ethnicity, or religion. These crimes, whether intentionally or not, have a ripple effect on societal values, and especially spread fear within oppressed minority groups. This research begins by examining the context that precipitated a need for hate crime laws to begin with and then looks at federal developments as a reaction to landmark hate crime cases. One of Senator Arlen Specter’s key areas of policy impact lies right here in hate crimes. Through means of the Arlen Specter Senatorial Papers his contributions in both Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania are explored. Finally, the debate over hate crime legislation as it exists today is had. This research is expected to analyze bias motivated crime through a contextualizing historical lens of Arlen Specter’s work and then use that analysis to work through the current debate over legislation

Two theoretical dimensions of the cyber hate crime

The impact and relationship between technologies and society establish the development of certain adaptive models, based on coexistence (Human-information-Machine), as well as several behavioral and cognitive changes of the human being, and new models of influence and social control through ubiquitous communication. which is the basis of a new social units called "virtual communities". The rupture of social norms that accompanies rapid social change, and subsequently the appearance of sub-cultural values establishes gaining status of participation in criminal activities, the components of social unites in general conform to social norms by social ties. the individuals or groups see themselves unfairly disadvantaged compared to other similar individuals, within physical-cybernetic ecosystem environment, which supports the interconnection and transformation of social phenomenon of digital dimension, with several implications in cyber hate crime. Thereby establishing the theoretical basis for further research looking which social vulnerability, identify the trajectory of the massive vector of impact "Information", which is a component of social cybernetics from the following three dimensions: (P) Propagation - (R) Replica - (C) Control called the "Cyber Hate Crime Pathway" that links hate crimes within the cyber-physical ecosystem, and where different types of social vulnerability are established. This study incorporates an epistemology approach of the relation between social and cybernetic theories, that will allow establishing a scientific base for future research in the field of new phenomena that will continue to appear within the Physical-Cybernetic ecosystem. It will also allow the contributions and implications to science derived from the product of this research establish a global holistic field applied to criminal justice system, academic and the new entities of social cybernetic

Governance of Digitalization in Europe A contribution to the Exploration Shaping Digital Policy - Towards a Fair Digital Society? BertelsmannStiftung Study

Digital policy is a unique policy area. As a cross-cutting policy issue, it has an impact not only on individual areas of regulation but on almost all other policy areas as well. Aspects of digital policy such as data regimes, cybersecurity and standardization issues are relevant not only to the the future of the internet or 5G mobile communications infrastructure, but to other areas of our lives to which they are closely linked, which range from automated driving to digital assistance systems in education and healthcare to the digitalization of sectors such as agriculture and construction. Nevertheless, regulation efforts have thus far been primarily sector-specific and national in their scope. With a few exceptions, such as the EU’s controversial General Data Protection Regulation, there are few digital policy frameworks in place for Europe that defines and integrates basic principles for broad application. Instead, we face a situation in which a variety of approaches stand side by side, at times complementing each other but also – all too often – competing with each other in ways that foster inconsistencies. The development of Europe’s 5G infrastructure is illustrative of this state of affairs. Despite the presence of what were originally uniform objectives across Europe, 28 nationally distinct tendering procedures with different requirements have since emerged. As a result, we must now find ways to manage the problems associated with having three or more networks per country, high costs, a difficult debate over security and the threat of dependency on non-EU providers

Social Media Accountability for Terrorist Propaganda

Terrorist organizations have found social media websites to be invaluable for disseminating ideology, recruiting terrorists, and planning operations. National and international leaders have repeatedly pointed out the dangers terrorists pose to ordinary people and state institutions. In the United States, the federal Communications Decency Act’s § 230 provides social networking websites with immunity against civil law suits. Litigants have therefore been unsuccessful in obtaining redress against internet companies who host or disseminate third-party terrorist content. This Article demonstrates that § 230 does not bar private parties from recovery if they can prove that a social media company had received complaints about specific webpages, videos, posts, articles, IP addresses, or accounts of foreign terrorist organizations; the company’s failure to remove the material; a terrorist’s subsequent viewing of or interacting with the material on the website; and that terrorist’s acting upon the propaganda to harm the plaintiff. This Article argues that irrespective of civil immunity, the First Amendment does not limit Congress’s authority to impose criminal liability on those content intermediaries who have been notified that their websites are hosting third-party foreign terrorist incitement, recruitment, or instruction. Neither the First Amendment nor the Communications Decency Act prevents this form of federal criminal prosecution. A social media company can be prosecuted for material support of terrorism if it is knowingly providing a platform to organizations or individuals who advocate the commission of terrorist acts. Mechanisms will also need to be created that can enable administrators to take emergency measures, while simultaneously preserving the due process rights of internet intermediaries to challenge orders to immediately block, temporarily remove, or permanently destroy data

Towards Measuring Adversarial Twitter Interactions against Candidates in the US Midterm Elections

Adversarial interactions against politicians on social media such as Twitter have significant impact on society. In particular they disrupt substantive political discussions online, and may discourage people from seeking public office. In this study, we measure the adversarial interactions against candidates for the US House of Representatives during the run-up to the 2018 US general election. We gather a new dataset consisting of 1.7 million tweets involving candidates, one of the largest corpora focusing on political discourse. We then develop a new technique for detecting tweets with toxic content that are directed at any specific candidate.Such technique allows us to more accurately quantify adversarial interactions towards political candidates. Further, we introduce an algorithm to induce candidate-specific adversarial terms to capture more nuanced adversarial interactions that previous techniques may not consider toxic. Finally, we use these techniques to outline the breadth of adversarial interactions seen in the election, including offensive name-calling, threats of violence, posting discrediting information, attacks on identity, and adversarial message repetition