Algorithms Against Antisemitism? Towards The Automated Detection of Antisemitic Content Online
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The proliferation of hateful and violent speech in online media underscores the need for technological support to combat such discourse, create safer and more inclusive online environments, support content moderation and study political-discourse dynamics online. Automated detection of antisemitic content has been little explored compared to other forms of hate-speech. This chapter examines the automated detection of antisemitic speech in online and social media using a corpus of online comments sourced from various online and social media platforms. The corpus spans a three-year period and encompasses diverse discourse events that were deemed likely to provoke antisemitic reactions. We adopt two approaches. First, we explore the efficacy of Perspective API, a popular content- moderation tool that rates texts in terms of, e.g., toxicity or identity-related attacks, in scoring antisemitic content as toxic. We find that the tool rates a high proportion of antisemitic texts with very low toxicity scores, indicating a potential blind spot for such content. Additionally, Perspective API demonstrates a keyword bias towards words related to Jewish identities, which could result in texts being falsely flagged and removed from platforms. Second, we fine-tune deep learning models to detect antisemitic texts. We show that OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 can be fine-tuned to effectively detect antisemitic speech in our corpus and beyond, with F1 scores above 0.7. We discuss current achievements in this area and point out directions for future work, such as the utilisation of prompt-based models.
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This work is licensed under an CC BY 4.0 Attribution 4.0 International. This license
enables reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium
or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial
use. CC BY includes the following elements: credit must be given to the creator.
Attribution should include the following information:
enables reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium
or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial
use. CC BY includes the following elements: credit must be given to the creator.
Attribution should include the following information:
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205–236
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Algorithms Against Antisemitism? Towards The Automated Detection of Antisemitic Content Online. . 2024: 205–236. https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.11647/obp.0406.08
