Online violence: an escalating maelstrom of Hatred, Misogyny, Disinformation, Bias, and Coordination
Diana Maynard
University of Sheffield
Online violence is one of the biggest contemporary threats to global freedom of speech. For public figures, the need to engage with the community is paramount, but at the same time can have debilitating consequences. Daphne Caruana Galizia is one of many journalists who was assassinated as a direct consequence of her reporting on state corruption, and she is not alone. Her attack did not come out of the blue - it was seeded by online attacks and threats. Even in the UK, a relatively peaceful country, MPs and journalists are constantly bombarded with online abuse and disinformation. This talk will give an overview of some of our recent research developing a multidisciplinary approach to collect, analyse, monitor and report on online violence against public figures around the world, including our latest "alert and response" dashboard to monitor and warn of potential escalation to offline harm. We focus particularly on issues of gender and intersectionality, as well as investigating the link between online abuse and disinformation, the detection of networked coordination, and discussing issues around the development of data and tools for analysis of hate speech, in particular that of bias.