Stronger Together: Unleashing the Social Impact of Hate Speech Research
This work addresses the social impact of hate speech for marginalized communities, but it is incremental as it builds on existing ideas without introducing new technical solutions.
The paper tackles the problem of hate speech on social media by proposing a shift from computational to social methods, arguing that linguists and NLP researchers should collaborate with communities and policymakers to enable equitable digital inclusion and close the digital divide.
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.