What factors are considered while defining hate speech?
Why this topic for my thesis?
West-centric research mostly - majority of academic publishing, industrial advancements
Colonialism in AI
India-specific issues when it comes to hate speech detection
Issues with Western focus in ML R&D
Most popular internet applications developed in US/Europe
- narrow intended audience
- lack of resources for other cultures/countries
- similar situation in academic research
Perspective matters in hate speech - who gets a say?
- Depends on who holds power in global landscape
- Easy to dictate terms when you're the default arbiter of everything
Highly subjective nature of hate speech
India-specific issues
Consequences of Western orientation:
- significant population without English-medium education
- other factors of discrimination
Casteist hate speech/caste as a protected category
- What is caste? Why does it matter?
Sociopolitical landscape: rise in communal violence, hate crimes
Code-mixed language/multilinguility
Other issues
Instances of racist bias in hate speech models: recent work demonstrating bias against African-American English in models
Lack of non-English data: serious setback
What I hope to do
Study how hate speech models built with a US-centric idea of hate and racism function in a non-Anglophone context
Specifically how do they work with Indian data?
Evaluation/auditing: running state-of-the art hate speech detection models on Indian data and analyzing performance
A thorough literature review
What I hope to do (cont.)
Write about categories in hate speech: extreme speech, dangerous speech, fear speech etc.
(Misc.) A commentary on caste in computing (particularly casteist speech), how it manifests on social media: linguistic markers etc.
Some more focus on WhatsApp and its part in spreading inflammatory, hateful content and instigating communal violence in India
Some takeaways
A conversation about hate speech is a conversation about society.
It is also a conversation about the concentration of power - who gets to express their sentiments, who gets to air their hateful opinions
Subjectivity: a lot of nuances to hate speech, which we can barely begin to capture