‘Urgent need’ for more accountability from social media giants to curb hate speech: UN experts

In a detailed statement, more than two dozen UN-appointed independent human rights experts – including representatives from three different working groups and multiple Special Rapporteurs – called out chief executives by name, saying that the companies they lead “must urgently address posts and activities that advocate hatred, and constitute incitement to discrimination, in line with international standards for freedom of expression.” Tweet URL Time to change They said the new tech billionaire owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, who heads Google’s parent company Alphabet, Apple’s Tim…

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#SocialMedia4Peace: Pilot Bosnia and Herzegovina counters online disinformation and hate speech

On 29 June 2021, the European Union and the Antenna in Sarajevo of the UNESCO Regional Bureau for Science and Culture in Europe officially inaugurated the ‘Social Media 4 Peace’ project in pilot country Bosnia and Herzegovina. Discussions emphasised the powerful role that social media and ICT play in shaping socio-political realities, and the need to strengthen the resilience of civil society in the face of potentially harmful content distributed online especially content that incites hatred and violence. The lessons learnt at the local level will feed-in for the global…

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Health in Mind joins UK charities together to address hate speech on social media

This July, Facebook’s policies for addressing hate speech are under increasing global scrutiny as big businesses boycott advertising on the platform. But the reality is that this is a problem for any organisation which uses their platforms. In response to this moment, Health in Mind has joined forces with 37 other charities to form a working group which will review what’s happening, how it impacts our ability to support beneficiaries and bring recommendations of change to the social media owners. As charities, we recognise that these platforms have a role…

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Possible Aims to Slow the spread of hate. One tweet at a time. #WeCounterHate

WeCounterHate is a new campaign by POSSIBLE that seeks to reduce hate speech on Twitter by turning retweets of these hateful messages into donations for a good cause. What topic gathers more tweets and retweets than the MLB, the Grammys and the Super Bowl? Hate. Racist messaging is unfortunately one of the more popular topics on Twitter. Recognizing this, the WeCounterHate campaign was created. Using machine learning, it first identifies hateful speech on the platform. A human moderator then selects the most offensive and most dangerous tweets and attaches an…

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