If heading to AoIR 2017, consider also joining our preconference on hate speech recognition and prevention! an AoIR 2017 Preconference workshop: * * * Less Hate in Politics! Machine Learning and Interventions as Tools to Mitigate Online Hate Speech in Political Campaigns * * * Oct 18th, 9 am - 12:30 pm Dorpat Convention Centre, Tartu, Estonia Discriminating, hateful speech online, often targeting specific groups and minorities, has become a pressing problem in the societies. Hateful speech is a form of verbal violence that creates enemities, silences debates, and marginalizes individuals and groups from participation online. What is challenging is that ‘hate speech’ has come to mean a variety of speech acts and other ill-behaviours online, ranging from penal criminal acts to speech which is uncivil and disturbing, but yet to be tolerated. This definitional difficulty is further abused in claims that any limitations of hate speech endanger people’s right to freedom of expression. Hate speech has been criminalized in many countries and major Internet companies also engage in efforts to limit it. While many social media platforms allow users to flag content as hate speech for moderation purposes, no official follow-up actions take place. Furthermore, the automatic identification of hate speech is limited by lacking tools. * Pre-conference workshop aim and content * The aim of the workshop is to facilitate the development of tools and processes how the academic community could run interventions which aim to decrease the toxicity in the online space. We will provide participants a kick-start with computational tools for hate speech recognition. We will also discuss and reflect the challenges of such interventions and examine the opportunities and problems of deploying such systems. Our own experiences – which we reflect in the workshop – emerge from a project where the social media activity of candidates was monitored during the Finnish municipal election campaigns in April 2017. The workshop will follow an interactive style using both online and offline tools to facilitate discussion. More details on the AoIR website: https://aoir.org/aoir2017/preconworkshop/#LHP Registration for the preconference is done via the main conference registration form. -- Salla-M Laaksonen // @jahapaula PhD Researcher Communication Research Centre CRC & Consumer Society Research Centre KTK Faculty of Social Sciences P.O. Box 54, 00014 University of Helsinki tel. +358 50 415 6576 salla.laaksonen@helsinki.fi http://blogs.helsinki.fi/smlaakso