250105 Hate Speech and Disinformation on Social Media (BS) (SoSe 2019)

Due to their involvement in revolutionary events such as the Arab Spring, Social Media providers like Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter, have long been hailed as great democratizers.
Recently though, Social Media providers are known to enable the dissemination of hate speech with the help of algorithms and thus create information bubbles. As regards to this, network providers are facing backlash over their responsibility in disseminating hate speech and disinformation, and their offline consequences. A particular grave example of this phenomenon is Facebook's role as the enabler of propagating hate speech against the Rohingya minority, which resulted in ethnic cleansing in Myanmar.

Through social media, incitement, hostility, violence, abuse, and harassment have found widespread dissemination, accessible to virtually anyone with an internet connection, with zero costs and hardly any legal consequences. This phenomenon raises the question whether the responsibility and liability for dealing with hate speech are with the providers, the users or governments.

This seminar offers an in-depth analysis and debate of selected case studies and on regulatory policies and educational instruments in order to understand, whether they are suitable to tackle hate speech and disinformation on social networks. To accomplish this, we will utilize a guiding framework for identifying and analyzing hate speech on the internet, which includes investigating the origin of the message, exploring the historical and immediate context of the post, and analyzing the language and subtext of the speech.

The seminar participants will develop a strategy to educate the public about the threat of the normalization of antisemitism, racism, and sexism on social media in order to challenge policymakers, activists, and industry representatives to collaborate to combat it.

Objectives:
1. How social networks operate
2. Definition of hate speech and disinformation by different social Media providers, the EU Commission against Hate speech, and NetzDG
3. The legal framework of globally operating social networks when it comes to hate speech and disinformation
4. Study Cases on Social Media:
4.1. Arab Spring
4.2. The Rohingyas in Myanmar
4.3. Antisemitism: political parties on Facebook
4.4. Sexism: Incels
4.5. Racism: Generation Identitaire

Bibliography

Eslami, Motahhare and Aimee Rickman, Kristen Vaccaro, Amirhossein Aleyasen, Andy Vuong, Karrie Karahalios, Kevin Hamilton, and Christian Sandvig. ”I always assumed that I wasn't really that close to [her]: Reasoning about Invisible Algorithms in News Feeds.” In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems .153-162. NewYork: ACM, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702556.

Lee, Diana. “Germany’s NetzDG and the Threat to Online Free Speech.” Media, Freedom and Information Access Clinic, Yale Law School. October 10, 2017. accessed November 18, 2017: https://law.yale.edu/mfia/case-disclosed/germanys-netzdg-and-threat-online-free-speech.

N.A. “Monitoringbericht 2015/16. Rechtsextreme und Menschenverachtende Phänomene im Social Web” Amadeu Antonio Stiftung, 2016. accessed November 18, 2017: https://www.amadeu-antonio-stiftung.de/w/files/pdfs/monitoringbericht-2015.pdf.

Oremos, Will.“Who controls your Facebook Feed.” Slate. January 3, 2016. accessed November 17, 2017: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/cover_story/2016/01/how_facebook_s_news_feed_algorithm_works.html.

External comments page

http://hcges.haifa.ac.il/index.php/en/staff/researchers?showall=&start=15