Digital Hate: Perpetrators, Audiences, and (Dis)Empowered Targets

Project Information

DIGIHATE

Grant agreement ID: 101055073

DOI

10.3030/101055073

EC signature date 18 October 2022

Start date 1 January 2023

End date 31 December 2027

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 499 591,25

EU contribution

€ 2 499 591,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITAT WIEN
Austria

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DIGIHATE (Digital Hate: Perpetrators, Audiences, and (Dis)Empowered Targets)

Reporting period: 2023-01-01 to 2025-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Ever since the rise of the internet and later social media, social science scholars have outlined how digital spaces have great potential to further democratize public discourse, for instance, by diversifying access to a wide range of information, facilitating contact amongst like-minded (and also oppositionally minded) individuals, reinforcing active citizen involvement in societal debates across socio-economic or other societal standings, and allowing them to better scrutinize public figures and institutions. However, this idealistic vision of democratically inclusive and discursively deliberative public arenas conflicts with current realities where more or less ungovernable digital spaces allow for malicious actors to foster and proliferate digital hate to reach beyond fringe groups into large platform audiences in order to mainstream discriminatory, dehumanizing, and threatening ideologies, thus constituting a major threat to democratic societies and their citizens across Europe (and, more generally, the world). Given these alarming socio-technological developments, it can be considered scholarships’ core mission to help inform public discourse and policymakers in a societally advantageous manner in their individual and collective efforts toward building and maintaining dignified societies in the digital world.

By systematically studying digital hate in its many manifestations not merely from academic or platform-organizational meta-perspectives but primarily by focusing on perceptions, motivations, and consequences of those who arguably matter most for the underlying communicative and psychological processes (i.e. of perpetrators, audiences, and targets with empowered and disempowered societal standings), DIGIHATE aims for a paradigm shift that is needed to be better able to analyze and address this crucial challenge in a multi-perspective and culturally sensitive way. In light of skyrocketing digital hate against socially disadvantaged communities but also people with high societal standing like politicians, journalists, and scientists, especially regarding topics like immigration, climate change, or public health, the timing of this project is crucial. According, DIGIHATE will significantly advance our understanding of why, when, how, and to what effect digital hate occurs with the goal of assisting civic society in designing and successfully implementing effective and efficient counteractivities.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Thus far, DIGIHATE has started to reach its objectives by combining systematic reviews of available research and a methodologically diverse set of empirical studies.

Specifically, DIGIHATE’s activities, on the one hand, include (a) an umbrella review summarizing comprehensively the current state of meta-evidence concerning digital hate in terms of methodologies, conceptualizations, main findings, as well as main research gaps, (b) three scoping reviews on distinct facets of digital hate (i.e. perpetration, target perceptions, content moderation) where current research is systematized to make visible blind spots in current academic inquiry, and (c) a narrative review about an international public service media project in which interactive prototypes for societally beneficial communication are developed. Systematically diagnosing both research and operational challenges from a bird’s-eye perspective and, based on that, offering feasible solutions provides an important basis for the field to move forward with greater effectiveness and efficiency. Especially, the umbrella review, which was awarded a competitive top paper award, exemplifies essential academic achievements given that digital hate as a novel umbrella concept may be suited to break up a conceptual gridlock where numerous overlapping concepts exist alongside each other in a maze-like field, inhibiting academic developments and averting societal value to emerge.

On the other hand, DIGIHATE has so far conducted a total of eleven methodologically diverse empirical studies, including (a) a two-wave panel survey, a mobile experience sampling study, an eye-tracking lab experiment, three online experiments, and a register study that were conducted in a single country or language region, as well as (b) an expert interview study, two cross-sectional surveys, and an online experiment where country samples from Austria, France, Hungary, and Sweden were recruited. All of these studies represent crucial pieces of the overall project puzzle, following up on our nuanced and heterogeneity embracing general standpoint to explore perceptions, motivations, and consequences of digital hate perpetrators, audiences, and targets from both empowered and disempowered groups. These studies, from which some were awarded with competitive top paper awards and are or will be published in high-quality journals, are first research achievements instrumental in building the basis for subsequent activities within the project.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Up until now, DIGIHATE’s research activities resulted in six published journal articles (e.g. in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, Information, Communication & Society, New Media & Society, and Computers in Human Behavior), as well as six competitive top paper awards at international conferences of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) and International Communication Association (ICA). While more project-related manuscripts are under review at prestigious journals in the fields of communication research and media psychology, we thus already experienced great appreciation from the academic community about the work within DIGIHATE, which suggests that our scientific impact will be further growing over time, ultimately contributing to the envisioned paradigm shift that the project aims for.

Singling out what we would consider, thus far, as the most significant achievements that reach far beyond the current state of the arts, we would highlight two yet unpublished but already distinguished projects: (a) an umbrella review and (b) an eye-tracking lab experiment. Concerning the former, such a comprehensive “review of reviews” was motivated by an often-bemoaned state where seemingly incommensurable facets of hateful online conduct have led to blurry evidence, complicating synergies and dialogue within academia and with both the public and policymakers. This unfavorable state has been in great need of unifying efforts in order to thrive (again), and we are confident that our umbrella review, as a suitable method to examine broad research fields for overarching patterns, shortcomings, and contradictions, can contribute substantially here. Concerning the latter, we acknowledge that, particularly but by no means exclusively among young people, most digital hate exposure nowadays happens within public surroundings where distracting noise fundamentally alters how such content is mentally processed. Establishing both a suitable theoretical framework and a promising methodological approach to study mobile-occurring digital hate that takes up many of the recent advancements from the broader field, this project exemplifies DIGIHATE’s groundbreaking work that will impact the field substantially by introducing novel avenues for internally and ecologically valid future research inquiries.