The project is a collaboration between the chair of data science at DWS group, the Leibniz center for economic research (ZEW), and the Rotterdam School of Management.
In the project, we aim at taking a data-driven approach to (a) understanding hate speech on social media in Germany, and (b) analyzing the effectiveness of
the German Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG). We concentrate on Twitter, since on the one hand, it is a wide-spread social network in which hate speech has been frequently observed, and on the other hand, it allows researchers to crawl larger amounts of data, which is not the case for many other platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram. In particular, we want to analyze whether Twitter's implemented deletion policies are an effective means to counter hate speech, and analyze whether these policies have any inherent biases.