Hate Speech

Fritz_X_DargesBlue42… Who Are You?

January 14, 2025
Jonathan Pérez
by Jonathan Pérez. Reflecting on the complexities of the human experience is paramount to conducting research. Jonathan Pérez, through his exploration of a conspiracy subreddit, reflects on his experience trying to find the human behind the datum. Jonathan critiques the harmful effects of dehumanizing rhetoric and the researcher’s responsibility to navigate ethical implications. In doing so, he establishes three guiding rules to support researchers seeking to humanize their analysis: 1) a researcher must always find the story behind the data; 2) a researcher must protect themselves; 3) a researcher must still humanize participants (even those who perpetuate harmful narratives).

Abstract: Constructing interval variables via faceted Rasch measurement and multitask deep learning: a hate speech application

November 26, 2020
Chris J. Kennedy

We propose a general method for measuring complex variables on a continuous, interval spectrum by combining supervised deep learning with the Constructing Measures approach to faceted Rasch item response theory (IRT). We decompose the target construct, hate speech in our case, into multiple constituent components that are labeled as ordinal survey items. Those survey responses are transformed via an IRT nonlinear activation into a debiased, continuous outcome measure. Our method estimates the survey interpretation bias of the human labelers and eliminates that influence on the generated...