https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108890960 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Online Hate Speech

59

Together, this absence of clear and consistent deﬁnitions of hate speech in
academic research, legal scholarship, and among actors attempting to govern
online spaces has meant that despite extensive research, and well-documented
policy interventions, our knowledge of the causes, consequences, and effective
means of combating online hate speech remains somewhat clouded by
deﬁnitional ambiguity.

detecting online hate speech

Just as there is no clear consensus on the deﬁnition of hate speech, there is no
consensus with regard to the most effective way to detect it across diverse
platforms. The majority of automated approaches to identifying hate speech
begin with a binary classiﬁcation task in which researchers are concerned with
coding a document as “hate speech or not,” though multiclass approaches have
also been used (Davidson et al. 2017).
Social_Media_and_Democracy