Researcher: Hate, dangerous speech low among Ethiopian facebook users

Ethiopians’ discussion on facebook is much more nuanced than perceived to be, according to a team of researchers monitoring the social media.

The lead researcher, Iginio Gagliardone, says the ratio of hate speech and dangerous speech is negligible.

Yet, one out of seven statements analysed were found to be “attacking another speaker or a specific group by belittling, provoking, teasing them maliciously, or explicitly threatening them”.  That might explain why some users perceive nasty statements dominate facebook. Such statements, however, do not always qualify as hate speech or dangerous speech.

“Often political opponents accuse each other of producing hate speech, but when analysed, most statements are actually just political insults”, added Iginio Gagliardone, a lecturer at the university of the  Witwatersrand  in South Africa and associate research fellow at the university of oxford 

The findings also shows that about half of the statements analysed were constructive, even if they may contain strong criticism.

The research covered 1055 facebook pages and 13,000 statements monitored between February and April last year. The project – dubbed Mechachal, an Amharic equivalent for tolerance – consisted academics from the University of Oxford and Addis Ababa University and has so far released two interim reports.

“These findings have broad implications for researchers studying online hate speech and for policy makers seeking to promote targeted responses to it. To our knowledge, this is the first time, a research focusing on an entire country, and its diaspora community, has been able to quantify the proportion of hate and dangerous speech among the total conversations occurring on a social networking platform”, Iginio Gagliardone said.

HornAffairs’ Daniel Berhane interviewed Iginio Gagliardone on the methodologies and findings of the research.

Source : HornAffairs