Publications

Firearms violence incident monitor – Methodological report

This methodological report provides a description of the development of the online Gun Violence Incidents Monitor (gunviolence.eu). The monitor aims to generate an almost real-time and automated identification of firearms incidents in all the EU Member States that is easily accessible to all stakeholders. Publicly available media articles are used to identify these incidents. The monitor implements and deploys different methods of AI, such as machine learning (ML) and large language models (LLMs), to automate the process of identifying, assessing, clustering and analysing media articles on firearms violence and firearms seizures in the EU.

2023

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Automatic detection of cyberbullying in social media text

While social media offer great communication opportunities, they also increase the vulnerability of young people to threatening situations online. Recent studies report that cyberbullying constitutes a growing problem among youngsters. Successful prevention depends on the adequate detection of potentially harmful messages and the information overload on the Web requires intelligent systems to identify potential risks automatically. The focus of this paper is on automatic cyberbullying detection in social media text by modelling posts written by bullies, victims, and bystanders of online bullying.

2018

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Tracing Online Misogyny: Ananalysis of misogynist ideologies and practices from a German-international perspective

Digital hate directed against women is a pressing issue that has been a public concern for years. Women are systematically attacked and denigrated on the internet. According to a recent representative study by the competence network against online hate, women are one of the groups that are most frequently affected. At the same time few mechanisms have been developed to protect them.

2023

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The Digital Misogynoir Report: Ending the dehumanising of Black women on social media

The Digital Misogynoir Report presents an analysis from Glitch & Textgain, revealing the alarming prevalence of digital misogynoir on social media platforms. This report discusses current efforts by tech companies and the UK government to create safer online spaces, as it exposes the distressing reality of dehumanising abuse targeted at Black women. Through rigorous statistical analysis of social media posts, we urgently call for action to combat the violent dehumanisation of Black women online.

2023

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Automatic Detection of Online Jihadist Hate Speech

We developed a system that automatically detects online jihadist propaganda by using techniques from Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. The system is trained on a corpus of 45,000 subversive Twitter messages indexed from October 2014 to December 2016. We present a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the jihadist rhetoric in the corpus, examine the network of users, outline the technical procedure used to train the system, and discuss examples of use.

2018

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QAnon: Spreading Conspiracy Theories on Twitter

Between 1st October to 5th November 2020, we analysed social media messages related to QAnon conspiracy theories, using Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology. This report outlines the results of the findings of our quantitative analysis, as well as the qualitative analysis by the partners of the Get The Trolls Out! project.

2020

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Multilingual Cross-domain Perspectives on Online Hate Speech

In this report, we present a study of eight corpora, by demonstrating the NLP techniques that we used to collect and analyze jihadist, extremist, racist, and sexist content. Analysis of the multilingual corpora shows that the different contexts share certain characteristics in their rhetoric. To expose the main features, we have focused on text classification, text profiling, keyword and collocation extraction, along with manual annotation and qualitative study.

2018

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Using a Personality-Profiling Algorithm to Investigate Political Microtargeting

Political advertisers have access to increasingly sophisticated microtargeting techniques. One such technique is tailoring ads to the personality traits of citizens. Questions have been raised about the effectiveness of this political microtargeting (PMT) technique. In two experiments, we investigate the causal effects of personality-congruent political ads. The results show evidence that citizens are more strongly persuaded by political ads that match their own personality traits. These findings feed into relevant and timely contributions to a salient academic and societal debate.

2020

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Online hatred of women in the Incels.me forum – Linguistic analysis and automatic detection

This paper presents a study of a (now suspended) incel discussion forum and its users, involuntary celibates or incels, a virtual community of isolated men without a sexual life, who see women as the cause of their problems and often use the forum for misogynistic hate speech and other forms of incitement. The aim of this study is to shed light on the group dynamics of the incel community, by applying mixed-methods quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyze how the users of the forum create in-group identity and how they construct major out-groups, particularly women.

2019

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Analysis of Memetic Warfare

If you ever wondered whether we are secretly ruled by alien reptilian overlords, when the Dark Enlightenment’s acceleration will begin, what the tailless amphibian wildlife in Kekistan looks like, or how to spot an Antifa tank – seek no further! Descend into the bizarre subcultures on 4chan, Telegram, Gab, and mainstream social media platforms we love so much.

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