Zooming in on Hate

Welcome to the Holiday special of Zooming in on Hate.

This past year has been a turmoil of events. And some pretty dark ones at that. We started the year off in a lockdown, of course there is still a war raging in Ukraine, there have been multiple hate crime shootings all over the world, and people are facing a cost of living crises we haven’t seen in years, wondering if they can even heat their homes this winter. 

Normally we would zoom in on those topics.. But this time, in the spirit of the holidays, we’re going to look at some positive stories for a change.

Working in the field of hate speech, disinformation and radicalisation we get confronted with the darkest parts of the world wide web. So, it's important to be reminded about the happy, wholesome and inspiring parts from time to time. That’s why we invited Toon Vos to join us today, to talk about the positive sides of the internet.

Toon Vos is both a writer and a designer, and has recently produced a wonderful special series titled the Wholesome Wide Web. The Wholesome Wide Web is a voyage to the online strongholds where people come together to meet, talk, share, and play. Places where the promise of the internet is alive and kicking.

You can find the stories here.

The worksheet is available here.

In this episode, we speaking to Julia Mozer, EU Public Policy Manager at Twitter and Carlos Hernández-Echevarría Head of Public Policy & Institutional Development, Maldita Spain, about moderation strategies on Twitter, and how to utilise online communities to counter disinformation.

This episode was recorded as a live webinar on the 20th of October. We all know that there have been some developments at Twitter since Elon Musk purchased the platform, so maybe some of the comments and findings you will hear have changed at this point. Still we feel that there is plenty of interesting content. With that in mind, sit back, relax, and enjoy this episode.

About our guests

Julia Mozer works as EU Public Policy Manager at Twitter, focusing primarily on hate speech and disinformation. Before joining Twitter, she worked as Policy and Communication Officer at CEJI, a Brussels-based NGO that tackles prejudice and discrimination of all kinds. In this role, she focused on hate speech, misinformation and online harms as well as on counter-speech and online safety. She developed and delivered training to NGOs, journalists and law enforcement agencies, engaged in policy discussion with social media companies and EU institutions, while managing several EU-funded projects. She also coordinated an EU-wide campaign on hate speech before the last EU elections. 

Carlos Hernández-Echevarría is Head of Public Policy & Institutional Development, at Maldita Spain. Before joining Maldita.es, Carlos spent 15 years working on television, especially on laSexta. Carlos has been a reporter, correspondent, was a Fulbright scholar and has a master's degree in Elections and Political Campaign Management from Fordham University in New York. He analyses US politics in various media such as eldiario.es , Historia y Vida or El Orden Mundial. He saw Obama win the primary and Trump get sworn in, so he has seen it all.

Additional reading

Blog: Twitter’s new reporting process centers on a human-first design

Blog: Our ongoing approach to the war in Ukraine

In this episode we are zooming in on the Council of Europe’s actions to counter hate speech in Europe. We are joined by Menno Ettema, who is the Programme Manager at the No Hate Speech and Anti-Discrimination Cooperation unit, Anti-Discrimination Department of the Council of Europe. He was co-secretariat to the Experts Committee that drafted the Committee of Ministers Recommendation CM/Rec(2022)16 on Combating Hate Speech which was adopted in May 2022. In his function he brings together the organisations work on combatting hate speech and discrimination through standards setting, monitoring and capacity building programmes in cooperation with member States and European partners.

He previously worked as the European coordinator of the No Hate Speech Movement, a youth campaign of the Council of Europe to mobilise young people for human rights and against hate speech online (2016-17) and as an educational advisor (2010-2015) for the Youth Department of the Council of Europe.

In this episode special episode we are zooming in on the killing of two men outside of a gay bar in Bratislava on the 12th of October in a suspected hate crime.

We are joined by Lukáš Zorád, who works for Partners for Democratic Change Slovakia. Lukáš works on projects and initiatives dedicated to prevention of violent extremism, de-polarisation and strives to look for ways to create constructive dialogue and increase understanding between people of opposing values. He is also working with us on shaping the European Observatory of Online Hate.

Tamás Berecz is an expert in the field of sociology and criminology. His main fields of research have been the media, specifically the racist tendencies towards the Roma in the Hungarian and international press. He was also heavily involved in the analysis of anti-terrorist legislation and its conflicts with human rights in Western democracies.

Since the beginning of 2016, Mr. Berecz has been working at INACH, collecting data, and conducting research on hate speech online. He co-wrote multiple papers on cyber hate and compiled studies on disinformation and conspiracy theories.

Eglė Kuktoraitė joined the National LGBT rights organization LGL in 2014 and assumed the role of Communication Manager. She is responsible for LGL's communication activities, as well as activism, advocacy, and fundraising. Eglė is an expert in inclusive education and has been at the forefront of LGL’s activities countering bullying and hate speech in Lithuania. Eglė was one of the organizers of the Baltic Pride festival in Vilnius in 2016, 2019 and 2022.

Eglė has been involved in the social media monitoring process since 2017. Since then, she has reported thousands of comments to the social media platforms. According to Eglė, social media reporting is one of the quickest and most gratifying processes to achieve progress in hate speech awareness. Every year, the results of reporting are plain to see in the social media as users in Lithuania are becoming more aware that platforms will not tolerate hate speech. Eglė will share her experience, insights about Lithuanian discourse on social media when it comes to LGBT persons, and lessons that she learned while reporting hate speech comments.

How can we disrupt terrorist organisations online? Are social media platforms doing enough? How can CSOs, NGOs and analysts help?

In this episode we are joined by Anne Craanen from Tech Against Terrorism to discuss disrupting online terrorism.

Anne Craanen is Senior Research Analyst at Tech Against Terrorism, researching Islamist terrorism, violent far-right extremism, the role of gender in terrorism, and counterterrorism policies. She also concentrates on OSINT analysis and has a background in social network analysis. She is the policy lead on the Terrorist Content Analytics Platform (TCAP), a platform developed by Tech Against Terrorism that alerts terrorist content to tech companies when found on their platforms. She previously worked for Artis International, Dataminr, and the ICSR as well as holds an MA in International Conflict Studies from King's College London and an MSc from UCL in Countering Organised Crime and Terrorism.

The Great Replacement Theory is a white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory that has been inspiring violent attacks such as the Christchurch attack and the Buffalo shooting. In this episode we are joined by Jakob Guhl from Institute for Strategic Dialogue to zoom in on the Great Replacement Theory.

Jakob Guhl is a Manager at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), where he mainly works with the digital research team. Jakob has co-authored research reports on Salafism, extreme right terrorism, Holocaust denial, coordinated trolling campaigns, hate speech and disinformation campaigns targeting elections.

Will the new EU Digital Services Act (DSA) have an impact on online hate and disinformation? What are the effects of this new legislation on social media users? What can we expect from the big platforms?

In Zooming in on hate we bring together the brightest minds from Law Enforcement, Academia, Civil Society, Policy, Tech and Platforms to thrash out solutions to Hate Speech and Disinformation.

In this episode we were joined by Līva and Josephine from HateAid to discuss the Digital Services Act.

Līva Vikmane is policy and advocacy officer in HateAid's Brussels office, where she works on strengthening users' rights within the EU's Tech regulations. Her background is in the European studies and public policy, having worked with several NGOs amplifying their policy impact, and currently she is pursuing a Masters degree in Digital Media, Ethics and Social Change.

Josephine Ballon is a lawyer and Head of Legal at HateAid, where she advocates to improve the legal framework for those affected from digital violence who are left largely unprotected against violations of their rights on the internet. Ms. Ballon was invited as an expert to the Legal and Digital Committee of the German Bundestag and the European Parliament to comment on legislative proposals of law enforcement against online hate crimes and platform regulation.

This episode focuses on Open-source Intelligence & Fringe Social Media Platforms. We’ll meet with Amra Dorjbayar, data journalist at the VRT, and Olivier Cauberghs, radicalisation and terrorism expert at Textgain.

This podcast delves into the current trends in the world of online influencers in and around the War on Ukraine. Who is getting it right and who is categorically not. Do governments have the right or a duty to steer their content production given the huge columns of disinformation and propaganda being generated by Kremlin bot farms and content production apparatus. The War on Ukraine is still raging as we record this podcast, and it is being mirrored online. There is an unprecedented amount of content being produced, mis and disinformation is flourishing, not to mention propaganda and deep fakes. How do we know who to trust and can we count influencers among those we can? Dare to be Grey’s Hannah Richter and Textgain’s Lydia El-Khouri joined influencer Nathalie Van Raemdonck to find out more about the world of influencers and their role in the war.