1st Edition

Counterspeech Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Countering Dangerous Speech

Edited By Stefanie Ullmann, Marcus Tomalin Copyright 2024
224 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

224 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This volume looks at the forms and functions of counterspeech as well as what determines its effectiveness and success from multidisciplinary perspectives. Counterspeech is in line with international human rights and freedom of speech, and it can be a much more powerful tool against dangerous and toxic speech than blocking and censorship. In the face of online hate speech and disinformation,... Read more

Introduction

Stefanie Ullmann

Part I: Approaches to Counterspeech: Linguistics, Philosophy and Interdisciplinarity

1. Counterspeech Practices in Digital Discourse - An Interactional Approach

Sebastian Zollner

2. The Philosophy of Counter Language

Laura Caponetto and Bianca Cepollaro

3. Seeing the Full Picture: The Value of Interdisciplinary Counterspeech Research

Joshua Garland and Catherine Buerger

Part II: Counterspeech in Context: Media, Culture and the Legal Framework

4. Counterspeech as Persuasion and Media Effects

Babak Bahador

5. Online Hate speech in Video Games Communities: A Counter Project

Susana Costa, Bruno Mendes da Silva and Mirian Tavares

6. Reimagining the Current Regulatory Framework to Online Hate Speech: Why Making Way for Alternative Methods is Paramount for Free Speech

Jacob Mchangama and Natalie Alkiviadou 

Part III: Automation and the Future of Counterspeech

7. Automating Counterspeech

Marcus Tomalin, James Roy and Shane Weisz

8. The Future of Counterspeech: Effective Framing, Targeting, and Evaluation

Erin Saltman and Munir Zamir

Conclusion

Marcus Tomalin

Biography

Stefanie Ullmann is a linguist and postdoctoral research associate at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge, UK. Her research interests include the use of language in politics and media discourse as well as forms and effects of harmful language in online discourse. She is the author of several journal publications on combatting and mitigating digital harms. Her book Discourses of the Arab Revolutions (2022) examines the power and functions of language in sociopolitical conflicts.

Marcus Tomalin has been a member of the Machine Intelligence Laboratory in the Department of Engineering at Cambridge University since 1998. He has published extensively on speech recognition, speech synthesis, machine translation, and dialogue systems, as well as various topics in the philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics, with a recurrent focus on the interconnections between mathematics, logic, and syntactic theory. He has a particular interest in the ethical and social impact of language-based AI systems, and he teaches ethics to undergraduates and postgraduates who are studying philosophy, computer science, and information engineering.