Hate Speech: Measures & Counter-measures - Helen Margetts

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About the event: Hate and harassment: can technology solve online abuse?

Governments around the world are increasingly concerned by the prevalence, spread and impact of harmful online content, such as harassment, bullying and hate speech. Online abuse poses myriad concerns: it can inflict harm on targeted victims, pollute civic discourse, make online environments unsafe, create and exacerbate social divisions, and erode trust in the host platforms.

Many hope that increasingly sophisticated and powerful algorithms will ‘solve’ the problem of online abuse by making this content easier to detect and takedown. However, abusive content detection has proven to be a wicked challenge. Not only is it a very difficult engineering task; it is also imbued with complex legal, social and political challenges. Researchers are increasingly drawing attention to the biases in some widely used tools and datasets, raising concerns that they might perpetuate the injustices they are designed to overcome.

Currently, Facebook’s ‘Supreme Court’ of content moderation is gearing up to pass judgements; the UK Government is reviewing its wide-ranging Online Harms White Paper; social media platforms across the world are tightening up their community guidelines and investing in more tech to counter online abuse. In this pertinent moment, our experts discuss a fundamental question for society: Can technology solve online abuse?

This is the third event of the 'Driving Data Futures' lecture series in the Public Policy Programme, where we invite audiences to learn and critically engage with new research at the intersection of new technologies, public policy, and ethics. At this event, there will be presentations delivered by academia, industry, and government, in addition to the Turing’s Hate Speech project team presenting their latest research in the field. This will be followed by a detailed Q&A, chaired by Dr Bertie Vidgen.

About the speaker:

Helen Margetts is a Turing Fellow and Director of the Public Policy Programme at The Alan Turing Institute, and Professor of Society and the Internet at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of Mansfield College. From 2011 to 2018, she was Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, a multi-disciplinary department of the University of Oxford dedicated to understanding the relationship between the Internet and society, before which she was UCL's first Professor of Political Science and Director of the School of Public Policy (1999-2004). After an undergraduate degree in Mathematics, she worked as a computer programmer and systems analyst for Rank Xerox and Amoco before returning to study political science at LSE (MSc 1990, PhD 1996), where she also worked as a researcher.

Helen sits on the UK government’s Digital Economy Council, the Home Office Scientific Advisory Council, the WEF Global Agenda Council on Agile Government and the Ada Lovelace Institute for Data Ethics. She was a member of the UK government’s Digital Advisory Board (2011-16). She is the founding Editor of the journal Policy and Internet, published by Wiley. In 2018 she was awarded the Friedrich Schiedel Prize by the Technical University of Munich for research and research leadership in technology and politics. In the 2019 New Years Honours List she was awarded an OBE for services to social and political science. In 2019 she was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy and also took up a visiting appointment as the John F Kluge Senior Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress.