Is the internet supercharging hatred? Information School Assistant Professor Anna Lauren Hoffmann and fellow panelists tackled that question in a lively discussion Oct. 9 at Town Hall Seattle.
The event, âOne Click Away: Hate and the Internet,â was sponsored by , the iSchool and . It challenged panelists with questions about whether large technology platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Reddit are amplifying hate speech, and whether those same private companies should be responsible for preventing it. Much of the discussion focused on whether social media sites are up to the task.
âIt is a problem of scale,â said Hoffmann, who researches questions of data, technology and ethics. She questioned Facebookâs ability to combat hate speech when its primary motivation is growth. âThere are dictates and demands to increase user bases. When you increase scale, you get some of these problems. You couldnât feasibly hire the number of people that it would take to human-moderate the amount of content thatâs coming through these platforms.â
If a company can dominate the market as Facebook does but canât stop the torrent of hate speech, Hoffmann asked, âShould we have companies as big as Facebook?â
Joining Hoffmann on the panel were Lindsay Blackwell, a researcher on Facebookâs Community Integrity Team; Shankar Narayan, Technology and Liberty Project director with the ACLU of Washington; and moderator Eric Davis, an associate professor of sociology at Bellevue College.
Narayan talked about the structural racism at the root of much of the hate speech online and urged efforts to educate people about the underlying problems â racism, sexism and other âismsâ that allow hatred to flourish.
âHate predates the internet. Itâs always been a symptom of really deep structural inequity,â Narayan said.
Blackwell addressed the challenge of trying to keep up with the constant flow of hate speech on platforms such as Facebook, even with thousands of moderators on the job. Like Narayan, she suggested education is key. She noted that Facebook has gotten more proactive about instructing users about what is acceptable behavior on the platform.
âIf we donât do something about the input â the root causes when people go on Twitter or Facebook and say [terrible] things to each other â then weâre never going to solve this problem,â Blackwell said.
A follow-up panel discussion, also featuring Hoffmann and Blackwell, will take place Nov. 18 at the Grand Cinema in Tacoma.