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Hi everyone,</div>
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The Sociology Department is hosting their annual Blackmar Lecture this week, which might be of interest to some of us. Please see below.</div>
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Dr. Thomas Davidson from Rutgers University will present a talk titled <i>“Hate Speech in Context: A Sociological Approach to Online Content Moderation.”</i></div>
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The lecture will take place on <b>Thursday, May 1st at 3:00 p.m.</b> in the <b>Jayhawk Room of the Kansas Union</b>. It will run for approximately 45 minutes, followed by a 30–40 minute Q&A session.</div>
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Below is the title and abstract of Dr. Davidson’s talk:</div>
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<b>Hate Speech in Context: A Sociological Approach to Online Content Moderation</b></div>
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Social media platforms routinely employ workers and automated systems to screen online content on an industrial scale. These systems help remove offensive, misleading, and illegal material, but can also exhibit racial biases and suppress legitimate speech.
I examine why systems designed to protect marginalized groups can instead result in unintended discrimination. I use a conjoint experiment to analyze how perceptions of hate speech vary according to characteristics of the target, the speaker, and the observer,
as well as other social and linguistic context. While there is a general consensus about the speech most likely to offend or violate policies, the results show substantial heterogeneity among observers by race, ideology, and attitudes, with evidence of divergent
normative understandings of hate speech. In a second study, I apply the same design using state-of-the-art vision-language models to assess whether artificial intelligence can make contextualized evaluations. These tools mirror some aspects of human decision-making,
suggesting that AI could help improve automated content moderation, but racial and lexical biases persist. Together, these studies show how a sociological perspective can provide new insights into content moderation and inform more equitable solutions to addressing
online hate speech.</div>
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The flyer is attached.</div>
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Anton Shirikov</div>
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Assistant Professor</div>
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Political Science Department</div>
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The University of Kansas</div>
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shirikov@ku.edu</div>
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