Abstract

The spread of online misinformation and hate speech shows no signs of ceasing. Yet, current approaches towards tackling the problem are still largely insufficient, as they rely largely on content moderation (often still performed by humans), reporting and censoring. Recently, a growing number of research studies have started looking at the effectiveness of Counterspeech and automating such approaches. Counterspeech is based on the idea that more (good) speech is a better approach to hate than censorship and banning. While Counterspeech can be a successful means in fighting online hate speech, computational approaches to Counterspeech are still in their infancy. This talk will reflect on the current state of research and consider ethical considerations as well as technological benefits and challenges in automating Counterspeech.