"The Courage Against Hate initiative has been brought together by Facebook for the purpose of sparking cross-sector, pan-European dialogue and action to combat hate speech and extremism. This collection of articles unites European academic analysis with practitioners who are actively working on countering extremism within civil society. Hate and extremism have no place on Facebook and we have been making major investments over a number of years to improve detection of this content on our platforms, so we can remove it quicker - ideally before people see it and report it to us. We’ve tripled - to more than 35,000 - the people working on safety and security at Facebook, and grown the dedicated team we have leading our efforts against terrorism and extremism to over 350 people. This group includes former academics who are experts on counterterrorism, former prosecutors and law enforcement agents, investigators and analysts, and engineers. We’ve also developed and iterated various technologies to make us faster and better at identifying this type of material automatically. This includes photo and video matching tools and text-based machine-learning classifiers. Last year, as a result of these investments, we removed more than 19 million pieces of content related to hate organisations last year, over 97% of which we proactively identified and removed before anyone reported it to us." (Introduction, page 2)
RESEARCH BRIEFINGS
1 The European Far-Right in the Year of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter: Changing Targets, Tactics and Rhetoric / HOPE not hate, 6
2 Recent Trends and Perspectives: COVID-19 Pandemic Increases Right-Wing Extremism and Hatred in Europe / Jena Institute for Democracy and Civil Society, 20
3 ‘Join in or else die!’: Siege Culture and the Proliferation of Neo-Nazi Narratives Online / Center for the Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR), 36
4 Automatic Hate Speech Detection: Challenges and Opportunities / Swedish Defence Research Agency and Uppsala University, 57
CASE STUDIES
5 The Kaleidoscope of Counterspeech: From The “Silent Majority” / to the “Vulnerable Observer” / #iamhere, 70
6 Galop and Community Partnership Working to Combat Hate Crime / Galop, 84
7 Redirect North America: Challenging White Supremacist Extremism on Google Search / Moonshot, 93
8 The Online Civil Courage Initiative (OCCI) / The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), 101
9 Together #AgainstOnlineHate in Austria / Civil Courage and Anti-Racism Work (ZARA), 111
10 Using AI and Advocacy-driven Counternarratives to Mitigate Online Hate / Textgain and Media Diversity Institute, 119