Deplatforming Hate
Friday, April 23, 2021
12-1:30pm Eastern Time (US) / 6-7:30pm German time
Zoom Webinar
You can watch a recording of the complete event by clicking the button above.
About the Event
Deplatforming, or the removal of access to social media and other (online) platforms, has recently been on the rise, gaining attention as an antidote to the so-called toxicity of online communities and the spread of extreme speech.
The talk follows a series of extreme internet celebrities as they migrate to alt tech, particularly Telegram, after their accounts were suspended on mainstream social media platforms. It looks into their activity, speech and fan base or following, inquiring into the effectiveness of deplatforming, asking in particular who benefits. Are social media platforms, alt tech, the extreme internet celebrities, the internet and/or society at large the better for it?
About the Speakers
Richard Rogers is Professor of New Media & Digital Culture, Media Studies, at the University of Amsterdam. He is the director of the Digital Methods Initiative, known for the study of social media data, and author of Information Politics on the Web and Digital Methods (both at MIT Press). Most recently he co-edited (with Sabine Niederer) The Politics of Social Media Manipulation (Amsterdam University Press).
Co-moderator Monika Hübscher is a PhD candidate at the Haifa Center for German and European Studies at Haifa University in Israel. Monika is also a research assistant at the University of Duisburg-Essen, where she works on the project “Antisemitism and Youth.” Further, she is a doctoral fellow at the Center for the Analysis of the Right Wing (CARR). She was a visiting lecturer at Bielefeld University, where she co-founded the Working Group Hate Speech and Disinformation on Social Media. She researches and lectures on hate speech and disinformation on social media, focusing particularly on antisemitism. In the past year, she has presented her research in Germany, France, Italy and Israel. In June 2020 her article „Likes for Antisemitism: The AfD and its post on Facebook” was published in the Journal for Contemporary Antisemitism. She has written insights on the radical right and antisemitism in Germany for CARR and OpenDemocracy.