Digital Hate: Perpetrators, Audiences, and (Dis)Empowered Targets

The skyrocketing rise of digital hate can be considered the dark side of the democratizing power of the internet. Despite growing interest in the topic, there has never been a systematic investigation about the perpetrators, audiences, and targets of digital hate. To discover why digital hate emerges, why it is often tolerated, and what kind of effects it has, DIGIHATE will analyze the reasons, perceptions, and consequences of digital hate for all involved actors. In particular, DIGIHATE will cause a paradigm shift by systematically looking at both disempowered and empowered targets of digital hate as well as their complex intersections. Nine work packages (WPs) will form a unique multidisciplinary, multi-language, mixed-method approach, including computational analysis, qualitative work, large comparative (panel) surveys, experiments, and a longitudinal measurement burst design in four countries. WP 1 will conceptualize digital hate based on a context-rich netnographic analysis of online communities. WPs 2-3 will examine the actual perpetrators of digital hate using innovative methodologies. WPs 4-5 will study the perceptions and moderation strategies by the witnessing audience and explain why audiences remain silent. WPs 6-7 will comprehensively examine the effects on and the responses by the disempowered (i.e., women and Muslims) and empowered targets (i.e., politicians, journalists, and scientists) as well as their intersections. WPs 8-9 will develop a novel multi-platform, multi-issue comparative computational analysis of digital hate that is built upon the actual perceptions of digital hate by those who receive it, rather than using predefined, potentially biased AI algorithms. A project of this scale and disciplinary breadth has never been attempted before. DIGIHATE will not only move significantly beyond the state-of-the-art in the literature, its findings will also be helpful for building and maintaining dignified societies in the digital world.