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SUMMARY:Understanding and Automating Counterspeech - See in description
DTSTART:20210929T100000Z
DTEND:20210929T180000Z
UID:TALK162445@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr Stefanie Ullmann
DESCRIPTION:Online hate speech and the spread of misinformation continue t
 o increase\, notably exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic and recurring na
 tional shutdowns. According to a review published by The Alan Turing Insti
 tute in 2019\, between 30-40% of people in the UK have witnessed harmful c
 ontent and 10-20% have personally experienced abuse online. Moreover\, rec
 ent statistics released by the government on hate crime show that the numb
 er of hate crimes in England and Wales has increased steadily over the las
 t six years. Research suggests that there is a link between online hate sp
 eech and real-life acts of discrimination and violence. And while awarenes
 s of the problem increases on societal as well as governmental and corpora
 te levels\, current approaches are still insufficient as the spread of hat
 e speech and disinformation continues. Most social media platforms still f
 ollow a mainly reactive approach to harmful content and even if more conte
 nt were deleted\, it remains questionable whether removal or blocking is t
 he 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. Th
 is has equally brought into question how voice agents should counter this 
 form of toxic communication. \n\nAn increasing body of research from diffe
 rent fields such as linguistics\, philosophy of language\, media and commu
 nication studies\, law and policy\, computer science and information engin
 eering has been analysing the role and functions of counterspeech as a mea
 ns of successfully combatting hate speech\, verbal abuse and misinformatio
 n. Among the first to study counterspeech\, in 2015/2016\, in the context 
 of harmful language online were researchers at the Dangerous Speech Projec
 t. In 2017\, Facebook began to launch and promote several counterspeech in
 itiatives to fight hate speech on its social media platform. In descriptiv
 e and experimental studies\, researchers have found that counterspeech on 
 social media is not only a suitable way of engaging with harmful speech bu
 t is also shown to have a positive effect on bystanders\, and other users 
 are more likely to comment\, like or reproduce someone else’s counterspe
 ech. More recently\, experts from the fields of computer science and infor
 mation engineering have begun to apply computational methods to the proces
 sing\, generation and evaluation of counterspeech. \n\nThis workshop bring
 s together experts from different fields in academia (philosophy of langua
 ge\, 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.\n\nSpeakers\n\nAmali
 a Álvarez-Benjumea (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods
 )\n\nBabak Bahador (George Washington University)\n\nCathy Buerger (Danger
 ous Speech Project)\n\nJoshua Garland (Santa Fe Institute)\n\nRae Langton 
 (University of Cambridge)\n\nSina Laubenstein (No Hate Speech Movement Ger
 many)\n\nPunyajoy Saha (Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur)\n\nErin 
 Saltman (Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism)\n\nKenneth S. Stern (
 Bard Centre for the Study of Hate)\n\nNadine Strossen (New York Law School
 )\n\nLynne Tirrell (University of Connecticut)\n\nBertie Vidgen (Alan Turi
 ng Institute)\n\nThe schedule can be found here: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.
 uk/events/29885
LOCATION:Zoom
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