CRII: SaTC: Towards Understanding and Defending Against New Waves of Online Hate

University Of Texas At San Antonio, San Antonio TX

Investigators

Abstract

Rapidly changing world events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, have been accompanied by significant changes in discourse on social media platforms. Online hate has increased and arrives in waves; it is a deeply concerning problem that is negatively transforming the lives of internet users. Recent studies have demonstrated how online hate violates social media policies and describes the ramifications of these violations in the real world. Online hate is difficult to study scientifically. Sparse and biased samples of hate communications are available for computational analysis, especially when hate communications occur and spread suddenly. This project advances the frontiers of knowledge and our ability to defend against abd mitigate online hate. The project applies novel approaches to study waves of online hate, using new computational approaches to detect online hate policy violations and proposing new methods for moderation on social media platforms. To achieve these goals, the investigation is discovering and cataloging novel factors that characterize new waves of online hate. The categorization process is based on temporal and social measurement analyses of online hate communications. The project also is formulating new techniques to effectively discover linkages in social media streams. The key idea is to efficiently sample online hate datasets such that only samples that characterize new instances or forms of online hate are used for machine-learning training. The machine learning paradigm only needs a few samples to effectively learn to detect the new waves of online hate. The project also uses novel techniques to identify and track cross-platform transfers of online hate in user communities across different social media platforms. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.