Effectively reducing hate speech on social media is a defining challenge of the digital age. Hate speech expressions inflict non-trivial harm to individuals or groups based on their ethnicity, gender, religion and other characteristics. Hate speech’s lasting effects silence and marginalize vulnerable communities. When people see hate speech on social media they sometimes counter it publicly by condemning the transgression itself and/or by showing solidarity with the victim. In an in-the-wild study on X (formerly Twitter), we controlled user accounts to deliberately counter racist slurs and investigated whether transgressors would change their transgression behavior following our intervention.

The Digital Life Seminar series offers students and guests an opportunity to engage actively with leading scholars and practitioners researching and responding to the development and application of digital technologies.

Lee McGuigan is an assistant professor in the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. He studies the history and political economy of advertising, media and information technology. McGuigan's ongoing work looks at knowledge infrastructures and logistical processes in advertising and media industries. His book, "Selling the American People: Advertising, Optimization, and the Origins of Adtech," was published in 2023 by the MIT Press, and it is available for open-access download here. The book tries to make sense of today’s “attention merchants” and “choice architects” by examining how related efforts to predict and influence consumer habits and to package and sell audience attention have collectively channeled and amplified currents in surveillance, data processing and behavioral and management sciences.

Salil Vadhan is the Vicky Joseph Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, and Lead PI on the Harvard Privacy Tools Project. Vadhan’s research in theoretical computer science spans computational complexity, cryptography, and data privacy. His honors include a Harvard College Professorship, a Simons Investigator Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

The Digital Life Seminar series offers students and guests an opportunity to engage actively with leading scholars and practitioners researching and responding to the development and application of digital technologies.

The Digital Life Seminar series offers students and guests an opportunity to engage actively with leading scholars and practitioners researching and responding to the development and application of digital technologies.

The Digital Life Seminar series offers students and guests an opportunity to engage actively with leading scholars and practitioners researching and responding to the development and application of digital technologies.

Benjamin Mako Hill is an Assistant Professor in the University of Washington Department of Communication His research focuses on collective action in online communities and seeks to understand why some attempts at collaborative production—like Wikipedia and Linux—build large volunteer communities while the vast majority never attract even a second contributor.

The Digital Life Seminar series offers students and guests an opportunity to engage actively with leading scholars and practitioners researching and responding to the development and application of digital technologies.