Stronger Together: Unleashing the Social Impact of Hate Speech Research

TL;DR

This paper advocates for shifting hate speech research towards social methods, emphasizing collaboration with communities and policymakers to mitigate online hate and promote digital inclusion.

Contribution

It proposes integrating social approaches into hate speech research, moving beyond computational solutions to foster equitable digital spaces through interdisciplinary collaboration.

Findings

Social methods can complement computational approaches in hate speech mitigation.

Linguistics research can inform policies to reduce online hate and misinformation.

Collaborative efforts with communities enhance the social impact of hate speech research.

Abstract

The advent of the internet has been both a blessing and a curse for once marginalised communities. When used well, the internet can be used to connect and establish communities crossing different intersections; however, it can also be used as a tool to alienate people and communities as well as perpetuate hate, misinformation, and disinformation especially on social media platforms. We propose steering hate speech research and researchers away from pre-existing computational solutions and consider social methods to inform social solutions to address this social problem. In a similar way linguistics research can inform language planning policy, linguists should apply what we know about language and society to mitigate some of the emergent risks and dangers of anti-social behaviour in digital spaces. We argue linguists and NLP researchers can play a principle role in unleashing the social impact potential of linguistics research working alongside communities, advocates, activists, and policymakers to enable equitable digital inclusion and to close the digital divide.