Initiatives related to online hate

Hatelab (UK)

HateLab is a global hub for data and insight into hate speech and crime. We use data science methods, including ethical forms of AI, to measure and counter the problem of hate both online and offline. The HateLab Dashboard has been developed by academics with policy and practice partners to provide aggregate trends over time and space. The Dashboard is being piloted within policing, government and civil society organisations.

Alan Turing Institute's hub for online hate research (UK)

The Alan Turing Institute's hub for online hate research is an ongoing project to collate and organise resources for research and policymaking on online hate. These resources aim to cover all aspects of research, policymaking, the law and civil society activism to monitor, understand and counter online hate. Some of the resources may cross into closely related areas, such as offline hate, online harassment and online extremism. Resources are focused on the UK but include international work as well.

CYTREC - Cyber Threats Research Centre

The Cyber Threats Research Centre (CYTREC) is located at Swansea University. The center explores a range of online threats, from terrorism, extremism and cybercrime, to child sexual exploitation online and grooming.

The Centre for Hate Studies

The Centre for Hate Studies is located at Leicester University (UK). The Center works with organisations all over the world to improve responses through evidence-based training, research and evaluation. The center shapes policy and practice by enabling professionals to engage with diversity, support victims and tackle hate.

VOX-Pol

VOX-Pol is an international network of researchers focused on researching the prevalence, contours, functions, and impacts of Violent Online Political Extremism and responses to it.

International Network for Hate Studies

The International Network for Hate Studies (INHS) aims to provide an accessible forum through which anyone can engage with the study of hate and hate crime in a manner which is both scholarly and accessible to all. Academics, students, advocates and those working in the public and NGO sector can contribute through posting on the Network’s blog, and by attending conferences run by the Network.

#NoToHate

#NoToHAte is a UN-wide initiative designed to tackle hate speech. The initiative provides a road map on how UN can support and complement all States' efforts. The strategy emphasizes the need to counter hate holistically, while respecting freedom of opinion and expression, and to collaborate with relevant stakeholders, including civil society organizations, media outlets, tech companies and social media platforms.

Hate Speech Monitoring@UniTo

University of Turin (UniTO) initiaive on automatic hate speech detection in social media.

Projects related to online hate

The Research on Online Political Hostility (ROPH) Project

The ROPH project adress the challenges with frequent and intense online political hostility. The project will meet this challenge by identifying causes, consequences and counter-strategies related to online political hostility.

The project will answer questions like: Why do offline political frustrations escalate into genuine hostility when discussions go online; what are the consequences for victims and democracy alike; and how can online political hostility be stopped?

LiLaH (The Linguistic Landscape of Hate Speech in Social Media)

LiLaH is an FWO (Flemish NSF) and SSF (Slovenian Science Foundation) funded project focusing on building systems that can automatically recognize and analyse hate speech in social media texts.

LiLah is interested in the linguistic properties of the language that is used to express hate in social media. The languages addressed are English, Dutch, Slovene, Croatian and French.

Participation

Participation is a project with the aim to prevent extremism, radicalization and polarization that can lead to violence. This is done through more effective social and education policies and interventions that target at risk groups to be performed through the establishment of a holistic framework and the involvement of social actors, local communities, civil society, and policymakers.

INDEED

The INDEED project developes an evidence-based model for evaluation of radicalisation prevention and mitigation. The aim is to strengthen first-line practitioners’ and policymakers’ knowledge, capabilities and skills for designing, planning, implementing and evaluating PVE/CVE and de-radicalisation initiatives.

European Observatory of Online Hate

The European Observatory of Online Hate that will investigate into and report on the fundamental nature of the dynamics of online hate, how hate manifests itself, the connections between the perpetrators and their influence as well as disinformation strategies. EOOH have developed a a monitoring tool that is available in 24 European languages. The tool integrates data from several different platforms.

Block Hate: Buildning Resiliance against Online Hate Speech

Block Hate: Building Resilience against Online Hate Speech is a Canadian project with the overall objective improve community resilience by developing technological intervention tools to prevent, address and report online hate speech through community-based research.

Learn, Engage, Act – Digital Tools to Prevent and Counter Hate Speech Online – LEAD-Online

The project LEAD-Online addresses young people, teachers and media professionals and their ability to think critically and be media literate when it comes to dealing with the problem of hate speech online (HSO). The aim of the project is to empower participants to become agents of change. Within the project a training programme to recognize hateful discourses and underlying forms of intolerance prejudices and discrimination will be developed as well as innovative digital tools to classify, decode and counter Hate Speech Online.

REASON - React in the struggle against online hate speech

The REASON project intends to promote specific actions to counter hate speech, especially online hate speech, by involving professionals in the judicial field, teachers, professional communicators and targets of hate groups. REASON envisages the creation of a national Observatory for the identification and analysis of online hate speech, a point of reference for civil society and for institutional actors in the prevention of hate speech which refers to gender, sexual orientation, ethnic-racial, religious discrimination.

Fighting Terrorist Content Online

The general objective of FRISCO is to support Hosting Service Providers to comply to the Terrorist Content Online Regulation by informing hosting service providers and increasing their awareness of the Terrorist Content Online Regulation and their new obligations. The project will also develop and validate tools, frameworks and mechanisms to support hosting service providers in the implementation of the Terrorist Content Online Regulation. Within the project experience, best practices and tools to support the implementation of the Regulation will be shared.

RESPOND! No to Antisemitic Hate Speech Online

The collaborative project RESPOND! works to provide young people with the tools to speak out against antisemitic hate speech on the German-language web. Building on a combination of basic and applied research, RESPOND! aims to develop effective tools and approaches for both educational and preventive work. The project’s goal is to strengthen young social media users’ media literacy to help them recognize and respond to the discursive tactics of antisemitic hate speech online, even in its modern and more subtle manifestations.

Stop Hate Speech

The Stop Hate Speech project offers a local and innovative solution to curb hate speech. The project implements an algorithm to detect hate speech on the web. At the same time encouraging civil society to respond to hate with counter-speech to make the internet a better place.

Decoding Antisemitism

Decoding Antisemitism is an interdisciplinary and transnational research project that examines antisemitism online, focusing on the political mainstream of selected European societies – the UK, France and Germany.

Preventing Hate Against Refugees and Migrants

The main goal of Preventing Hate Against Refugees and Migrants is to monitor and model hate speech against refugees and migrants in Greece, Italy and Spain in order to predict and combat hate crime and also counter its effects. The main result of the project is identification and reduction of online hate speech and predictions of potential hate crimes.

FLYER (Artificial Intelligence to Characterize Extremist Content Online)

FLYER addressed the characterization and detection on extremism in French social media. The project developed semantic models to describe extremism and annotated corpora for extremism detection in French.

STERHEOTYPES

STERHEOTYPES is project focusing on on ‘racial hoaxes’, communicative acts created to circulate information that are an allegation of a threat posed against someone’s health or safety associated to individual or a group because of race, ethnicity or religion. The project is aiming at understanding the social and psychological processes emerging from racial hoaxes in digital generations across three border Mediterranean European countries (Italy, Spain and France) using different methods from psychology and computational linguistics.

STAND-UP

STAND-UP against hate in the EU aims to establish a public authority-led, multi-agency model for countering hate crime. STAND-UP strives to create a comprehensive and holistic counter-hate crime framework that covers all components of counter-hate process (reporting-investigating-prosecution-prevention), embedded within a framework of victim support.

Challenging hate narratives and violations of freedom of religion and expression online in

Project funded by the European Instrument For Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) that focus on two things: 1) protecting and promoting respect for freedom of religion and expression on the internet, by generating discourse that defends secular opinions touching upon religion and 2) Understanding and countering hate speech online, by generating narratives and discourse that defend diverse opinions.

#SpreadNoHate

An initiative from United Nations aiming at providing global media with a platform to engage in an international dialogue on hate speech against migrants and refugees and to share good practices to promote positive narratives.

Previous projects about online hate

Against Hate Project

The objective of the project Against Hate was to develop the work against hate crime and hate speech. The project focused on the development of hate crime reporting, on the enhancement of the capacity of the police, prosecutors and judges to act against hate crime and hate speech, and on the development of support services for victims of hate crime. The project was active between 2017- 2019.

Innovative Monitoring Systems and Prevention Policies of Online Hate Speech

The IMSyPP project was tackling hate speech in a multidisciplinary fashion combining machine learning, computational social science and linguistic approaches to support a data-driven approach to hate speech regulation, prevention and awareness-raising. The project was active between 2020–2022.

MANDOLA - Monitoring and Detecting OnLine Hate Speech

The goal for the MANDOLA project was to make a bold step towards improving our understanding of the prevalence and spread of on-line hate speech and towards empowering ordinary citizens to monitor and report hate speech.

sCAN project – Platforms, Experts, Tools: Specialised Cyber-Activists Network (2018-2020)

The sCAN project aims at gathering expertise, tools, methodology and knowledge on cyber hate and developing transnational comprehensive practices for identifying, analysing, reporting and counteracting online hate speech.

Respect and Equality: Acting and Communicating Together

The REACT Project aimed at countering hate speech, hate crimes and other forms of intolerance through the improvement of media literacy among educators and young people and the development of a counter narrative campaign.

BRICkS– Building Respect on the Internet by Combating Hate Speech

The BRICkS project aimed to combat the spread of online hate speech against migrants and minorities through media literacy and active involvement of web users and web content producers.

PRACTICIES (Partnership against violent radicalization in the cities)

PRACTICIES investigated radicalization in the cities by bringing together experts from the fields of humanities, political sciences, information sciences. The project provided a better understanding of the human roots of violent radicalization and also detection tools and prevention practices.

Do One Brave Thing

The objectives of the Do One Brave Thing project was to (1) Empower young people to challenge extremist narratives they experience in their daily lives. (2) Provide young people with media literacy skills and soware tools to investigate online sources of information and think more critically (3) enable young people to develop counter-narrative campaigns to challenge hate speech and extremist rhetoric online (4) Encourage young people to non-violently address their political grievances through policy-advocacy.