Spread of hate speech in online social media

The present online social media platform is afflicted with several issues, with hate speech being on the predominant forefront. The prevalence of online hate speech has fueled horrific real-world hate-crime such as the mass-genocide of Rohingya Muslims, communal violence in Colombo and the recent massacre in the Pittsburgh synagogue. Consequently, It is imperative to understand the diffusion of such hateful content in an online setting. We conduct the first study that analyses the flow and dynamics of posts generated by hateful and non-hateful users on Gab (gab.com) over a massive dataset of 341K users and 21M posts. Our observations confirms that hateful content diffuse farther, wider and faster and have a greater outreach than those of non-hateful users. A deeper inspection into the profiles and network of hateful and non-hateful users reveals that the former are more influential, popular and cohesive. Thus, our research explores the interesting facets of diffusion dynamics of hateful users and broadens our understanding of hate speech in the online world.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, and 4 tabl

CONSIDERATIONS FOR A DOMESTIC TERRORISM STATUTE

While the crime of international terrorism is clearly defined in U.S. law, the lack of a domestic terrorism charge has broad implications for the government’s actual and perceived ability to respond to acts of domestic violent extremism. The creation of a federal domestic terrorism statute would codify the severity of the threat into enforceable law and allow the government to respond more effectively. Such a statute could directly impact the First Amendment rights of U.S. citizens, however, via the monitoring of free speech and association. What then are the potential costs, benefits, and consequences of a domestic terrorism statute in the United States, especially pertaining to First Amendment constitutional rights? A qualitative case study was conducted to focus on three cases of political violence that may be interpreted as domestic terrorism in the United States: the Capitol riot, the Charlottesville attack, and the Pittsburgh synagogue incident. The findings of this study indicate that a statute can also be instrumental in the investigation and prosecution of domestic terrorism incidents by protecting targeted racial groups, preventing abuse of power and authority, increasing penalties, and giving victims and their families the justice they deserve. The main challenge is the argument that a statute would infringe on civil liberties, which could be prevented by having specific provisions about the limits of these civil liberties and a benchmark for inciting terrorism.Civilian, New York City Police DepartmentApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

Unified and Multilingual Author Profiling for Detecting Haters

[EN] This paper presents a unified user profiling framework to identify hate speech spreaders by processing their tweets regardless of the language. The framework encodes the tweets with sentence transformers and applies an attention mechanism to select important tweets for learning user profiles. Furthermore, the attention layer helps to explain why a user is a hate speech spreader by producing attention weights at both token and post level. Our proposed model outperformed the state-of-the-art multilingual transformer models.Schlicht, IB.; Magnossao De Paula, AF. (2021). Unified and Multilingual Author Profiling for Detecting Haters. CEUR. 1837-1845. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/1906611837184