Researchers from all over the world will attend the Berlin Conference on Hate Speech Analysis. Many of them are working on very interesting research projects regarding hate speech or other forms of offensive language. We have compiled an overview of the research projects related to the conference.

• Analyzing Dangerous Speech, Hate Speech and Offensive Speech in Romanian and Hungarian Public Facebook Contexts using Computational Sociology Approaches (ADHOC): The ADHOC research project aims to use digital social research methodology to create an overview of the issue of hate speech on public Facebook contexts through a comparative analysis of Romanian and Hungarian Facebook Fan pages and associated comment threads. http://adhoc.granturi.ubbcluj.ro 
• Automated analysis of the discussion culture in German news media: This project develops and tests automatic methods for identifying and predicting civil and uncivil discussion processes and then uses these methods to identify uncivilized discussion processes at an early stage across all media. https://www.cedifor.de/en/automated-analysis-of-the-discussion-culture-in-german-news-media/ 
• Comment Analysis with Deep Learning (CADL): In this project, we analyze comments, users, and articles to understand the dynamics, the information flow, and the interactions in the comment sections. We work on detecting inappropriate comments, predicting popular news topics, identifying fake news and recommending information. https://hpi.de/naumann/projects/web-science/cadl-comment-analysis-with-deep-learning.html 
• Deliberative discussions in the Social Web (DEDIS): The aim of the project is to investigate new measures of moderation and aggregation of public follow-up communication. First, new ways of moderating public access communication to counteract its brutalization and radicalization are investigated. Subsequently, new forms of aggregation and aggregation of follow-up communication on different platforms will be investigated. http://graduiertenkolleg-digitale-gesellschaft.nrw/dedis/ 
• Democratic Reslilience in Times of Online Propaganda, Fake News, Feat and Hate Speech (DemoRESILdigital): The project analyzes the actors, dissemination and impact of online propaganda, fake news, fear and hate speech on different target groups by means of an innovative integration of methods from social sciences, computer science, data science and experimental research on media effects. https://www.demoresildigital.uni-muenster.de 
• Deplatforming hate – Isolation, Radicalization and tactical innovation of hate groups in complex media ecologies: This projects investigates the consequences of site deletions for hate groups and their reorganization on fringe platforms. How differs the communication of hate groups on multiple platforms? Do bans by platforms accelerate radicalization processes? Which innovative repertoires do hate groups apply to circumvent repression and/or to build safe havens for hate communication? The project aims to decipher the levelling media practices of far-right actors ranging from incidences of hate speech on mainstream platforms to the incitement of violence and terrorism on messengers and chan boards. https://www.idz-jena.de/forschungsprojekte/rechte-radikalisierung-in-sozialen-netzwerken/ 
• Digitalisation and the Transnational Public Sphere: This project investigates the impact of digital technologies and media in the formation of transnational and national online issue publics, communication infrastructures and processes of political mobilization. We focus on right-wing and populist-right communication ecologies which develop around critical issues such as migration, asylum, anti-feminism, xenophobia or anti-Islamism in various European countries and the US. https://www.weizenbaum-institut.de/en/research/rg15/ 
• Digital Citizenship: This project investigates how people today see and shape their role in democracy. We pay special attention to how this relationship is shaped by online communication on an individual level. In this context, changing or newly emerging attitudes and expectations regarding political engagement in democracy – so-called emergent citizen norms – are identified on the basis of quantitative and qualitative methods and their consequences for individual political participation are analysed. https://www.weizenbaum-institut.de/en/research/rg13/ 
• Fair or Flawed: The project is funded by Facebook Research and analyses how moderation of hateful posts on social media and other websites is perceived by users. By conducting two experiments, we aim to explore how the type of moderator (AI vs. human), different moderation messages and moderated content affect perceptions of fairness, legitimacy and transparency, and how these perceptions and appeals against moderation are intertwined with discourses about the limitation of free speech. The cross-national study involves data collection in the Netherlands, Portugal and the US. https://www.eur.nl/en/news/research-project-hate-speech-moderation 
• Hate speech – measures and counter-measures: The project aims to understand the scale and scope of online hateful content, taking into account its different forms, from ‘everyday’ subtle actions to overt acts of aggression and criminality, and the different targets, such as ethnic minorities and women. The project also aims to understand the dynamics and drivers of hate, providing granular insight into when, where and why it manifests. https://www.turing.ac.uk/research/research-projects/hate-speech-measures-and-counter-measures 
• Information Diffusion on Twitter: The Effect of Hate Speech Regulation: We analyze the Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) established by the German government in order to constrain the free dissemination of “Hate Speech” on major social networks in Germany. We study the effect of the regulation on the content posted on Twitter by German politicians and the subsequent effect on users’ engagement reacting to these tweets. https://www.zew.de/en/forschung/information-diffusion-on-twitter-the-effect-of-hate-speech-regulation
• Less Hate, More Speech: The project examines the role political elites and mass media play in reducing or promoting anti-democratic and intolerant discourse among the citizens. It engaged an international group of social scientists in designing and employing online experiments, cross-national surveys and content analysis of online commentary on media content to understand the factors that shape the tone of everyday talk among Romanians, and create differences and similarities between Romania and Norway in popular responses to various discursive frames and elite signals. https://lesshate.openpolitics.ro/en/ 
• Migration and Patterns of Hate Speech in Social Media (M-PHASIS): This project examines what types of contexts relate to which types of hate speech. It embraces an interdisciplinary approach to its object and seeks to benefit from the inputs provided by computerized processing of hate speech in social media. The insights gained will allow producing a software app detecting and/or blocking hateful comments automatically. https://anr-dfg-mphasis.loria.fr 
• MODERAT!: Through an interactive and interdisciplinary approach, the project develops software tools and a practice-oriented web platform that enable platform operators to moderate network debates with significantly less effort. Comments are automatically pre-analyzed and filtered using machine learning methods, thus reducing the manual moderation effort. https://www.moderat.nrw 
• Network of Excellence of Training on HATE (NETHATE): The vision for the NETHATE (Network of Excellence of Training on HATE) ETN is to bring together an interdisciplinary team of world-leading European researchers to tackle a highly ambitious and relevant research project on the nature of hate. https://ahss.blog/2019/11/07/marie-curie-funding-for-uls-hate-and-hostility-research-group/ 
• NOHATE – Overcoming crises in public communication about refugees, migration, foreigners: The interdisciplinary project aims to analyse hateful communication on social media platforms, in online forums and commentary sections in order to identify underlying causes and dynamics as well as develop methods and software for (early) recognition of hateful communication and potential strategies for de-escalation. http://nohate.online
• Online aggression from a sociological perspective: An integrative view on determinants and possible countermeasures: The project introduces a theoretical model for explaining aggressive online comments from a sociological perspective. It combines individual, situational, and social-structural determinants of online aggression and tries to theoretically derive their interplay and suggests an empirical strategy for testing the model. The main contribution will be to match online commenting data with survey data containing rich background data of non- /aggressive online commentators. http://p3.snf.ch/Project-183204
• Online Hate Speech: The aim of this habilitation project is to conduct content analyses on sexist online hate speech and to develop a new psychological framework of online hate speech. https://www.researchgate.net/project/Online-Hate-Speech 
• Personalized AI-based Interventions Against Online Norm Violations: Behavioral Effects and Ethical Implications: This project combines expertise from psychology, ethics and informatics to conduct multi-disciplinary research on the psychological potential and ethical and technical prerequisites of personalized AI-based interventions targeting perpetrators of undesirable online behaviors. https://ieai.mcts.tum.de/research/personalized-ai-based-interventions-against-online-norm-violations
• Political Interest Networks in Facebook Portugal: This research project aims at characterizing the communicational activities of non-official political actors in the social network platform Facebook. The activities of the actors selected to constitute the corpus will be monitored during a period encompassing the European Parliament and the national legislative elections, with the help of methodological tools of digital methods and network analysis, and later ot netnography and content analysis. https://www.icnova.fcsh.unl.pt/en/political-interest-networks-in-facebook-portugal/ 
• PropStop – Identification, detection, and combating of hidden propaganda attacks via online media: This interdisciplinary project aims at studying hidden propaganda disseminations via online media, in order to identify and prove accordant attempts. Besides a large-scale examination of propaganda characteristics online, huge quantities of public opinion statements in different areas of the digital public sphere will be analyzed for repeated semantic and technical patterns. http://www.propstop.de/?lang=en 
• Racisms and public communications in the hybrid media environment (HYBRA): This project aims to analyze the public understanding, practices and experiences of racism in a context of a digitalised media. https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/projects/racisms-and-public-communications-in-the-hybrid-media-environment-2 
• Sanctions Among Users of Comments Sections on News Websites and on Facebook: The project examines how users sanction other comment authors in the online discussions and which factors influence their means to sanction. It conducts a qualitative and a quantitative content analysis of user comments on news websites of mass media institutions and on their Facebook pages. It analyses the strategies and particularities of reply comments and the use of social buttons as a means of sanctioning other users. https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/358324049?language=en
• STOP HATE SPEECH: This project mobilizes a community of volunteers that annotates comments collected on online news and social media platforms, producing training data for the development of a deep learning algorithm. Once trained, the algorithm will guide the same community to online news articles and social media posts, for which it predicts a high hate speech risk. In addition, the project will create a digital outreach center for those affected by hate speech as well as collect and publish statistical data on hate speech in Switzerland. https://stophatespeech.ch
• Switch OFF/ONline Hate Speech: The project deals with the hate speech issue within the Romanian online space, its main objective being the promotion of democratic values and the right to free speech in online. It aims at raising the awareness of 10 most followed Romanian bloggers and vloggers, as well as 10 journalists, who, as opinion shapers (target group), will deepen their understanding of the consequences of hate speech. https://eeagrants.org/archive/2009-2014/projects/RO09-0256 
• Towards Balance and Boundaries in Public Discourse: Expressing and Perceiving Online Hate Speech (XPEROHS): The overall aims of the project are to ascertain the extent of hate speech on major social media platforms in Denmark and Germany, to identify and systemize explicit and more subtle means of hateful expression as well as their functions in situated contexts of use, to identify mechanisms and patterns in the expression of hate speech, to uncover similarities and differences in thresholds of acceptance of hate speech and to assess the effects of varieties of hate speech, modality and group membership on the reactions and attitudes towards hate speech. https://xperohs.sdu.dk/general-overview/