From Online Hate Speech to Online Hostility: Understanding and managing hate speech across disciplines
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: This document reports the theoretical background informing analysis of online hostility for the project “Together Against Online Hate Speech”. The goal of this report is to provide an overview of how our thinking about “hate speech” has developed over time: how it is defined in different disciplines and how may it be managed? This overview serves to define and conceptualize online hostility for comparison across Germany, the Netherlands and Spain on Instagram, X and TikTok. Our review highlights the challenges in defining hate speech, while emphasizing a general consensus among various disciplines calling for the protection against hate speech, through a variety of approaches, and a shift towards subjective and contextual understandings of online hostility. The project “Together Against Online Hate Speech” consists of the following partners: Sharing Perspectives Foundation, Build Up, IchBinHier, FundiPau, and the University of Amsterdam. The project is funded by the European Union (CERV-2024-CHAR-LITI-SPEECH). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect thoseof the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
Source: Universiteit van Amsterdam
Institution: University of Amsterdam
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204544625