This latest policy brief, developed by participants in the Erasmus+ Blended Intensive Program “Digital Constitutionalism and the UN Global Digital Compact,” is the product of the Digital Constitutionalism Network’s successful Teaching Partnership that spans across several universities and enables students to engage both digitally and in person with pressing rights issues in the digital context. This brief is the sixth and final installment of a six-part series of policy briefs from the program held at the University of Bremen in the spring of 2024.

Presented by authors Myrthe van den Berg, Johanna Riemenschneider, Maka Etsadashvili, Malte Hans, Sharmila Dhungana, and Rebeca Vahedi, the policy brief “GDC: Hate Speech” explores the complexity of the issue of hate speech, particularly in the digital realm. The brief addresses the limited mention of hate speech in the Global Digital Compact, which tends to refer instead to freedom of speech, and the authors also accentuate the disproportionate amount of research on hate speech in Western countries relative to the Global South, which accounts for only a small fraction of studies on hate speech and is largely neglected by social media sites in terms of content moderation. The authors propose the establishment of a clearer and common definition of hate speech, as well as greater transparency with regard to content moderation approaches and strategies. Additionally, AI tools can be leveraged to accommodate minority groups or smaller communities that are currently overlooked on the content moderation front with respect to hate speech, and more resources can be placed towards educating the public to understand the difference between freedom of expression crosses the line into hate speech.

You can find the six policy briefs here: https://www.globaldigitalcompact.org/outcomes.html 

Photos: Matej Meza/Universität Bremen