The European Observatory of Online Hate & Textgain x Decoding Antisemitism
The European Observatory of Online Hate (EOOH) is a network of civil society, law enforcement and academic partners that seek to understand and mitigate online discord and promote resilience to hostile propaganda. The partners of the EOOH specialise in the analysis of phenomena such as online far-right extremism, antisemitism, Salafi-jihadism, misogyny, foreign-state propaganda, and disinformation. It focuses on early detection of emerging threats to democratic societies and opportunities for strategic dialogue to mitigate violence. The EOOH believes in a whole-of-society approach, where the voices of citizens, minorities, experts, scientists, policy makers and law enforcers resonate equally to contribute to strength in unity.
Textgain is an independent spin-off of the Computational Linguistics group of the University of Antwerp (CLiPS) and specialises in language technology for trend analysis of societal tensions on online social media. Textgain can offer insights about the impact of AI in-the-wild, that may be beneficial to the Decoding Antisemitism project.
The Decoding Antisemitism project and the EOOH share not only a similar goal, but also cutting-edge methodology centred around harnessing the potential of AI for monitoring and combatting prejudice online. A fruitful conceptual and methodological dialogue can therefore be implemented around two major axes. Firstly, the intersectionality of hate speech often demands a kaleidoscopical move towards such a research object; it is important to situate antisemitic narrative, argumentative and linguistic patterns within broader hate discourses. Secondly, the shared interest in AI and data sciences could lead to a gainful pooling of expertise and competences in this fast-growing field of hate speech studies.