#DEACTIVHATE: A Serious Game on Hate Speech and Stereotypes to Increase Awareness Among Italian Students
Authors: Beatrice Savoldi, Paolo Garza, Marco Enrico Piras (Università di Torino, 2021)
Topic: Sentiment, Emotion, Irony, Hate

Abstract
The possibility of raising awareness about misbehaviour online, such as hate speech, especially in young generations could help society to reduce their impact, and thus, their consequences. The Computer Science Department of the University of Turin has designed various technologies that support educational projects and activities in this perspective. We implemented an annotation platform for Italian tweets employed in a laboratory called #DeactivHate, specifically designed for secondary school students. The laboratory aims at countering hateful phenomena online and making students aware of technologies that they use on a daily basis. We describe our teaching experience in high schools and the usefulness of the technologies and activities tested.

Introduction
Recently, the presence of digital technologies in our lives has grown enormously, with a strong impact on our daily lives. Digital spaces and social media have become a privileged channel for communication, information and socialization, frequented by millions of people at the same time. Along with the new relational opportunities and access to knowledge, even misbehaviour have acquired new visibility and virality, such as hate speech. In spite of a causal link between hate speech and crime is hard to demonstrate, the risk of offences and effects on psychological and physical well-being of the victims are clear in psychological and social studies <cit.>. The extreme consequence of these effects might be suicide, especially considering the adolescents, as suggested by recent studies investigating the link between cyberbullying and suicidal behaviors of U.S. youth <cit.>. To prevent such scenarios, few awareness-raising projects in schools are activated by NGOs in Italy, such as Amnesty International[<http://di.unito.it/silencehateitaly>.] or Cifa ONLUS[<http://di.unito.it/iorispetto>.].The Commissione Orientamento e Informatica nelle scuole[<http://di.unito.it/orientamentoscuole>.] supports a manifold of activities with the main goal of creating a link between schools and academia, also in the context of the national project Piano Lauree Scientifiche (PLS).The members of the CCC (Content-Centered Computing) group of the Computer Science Department of the University of Turin, active in the investigation ofhate speech online[<http://hatespeech.di.unito.it/>.], have led and participated in severalhate-speech-related projects, including “Contro l’odio”[<https://controlodio.it/>.] <cit.> a joint work with non-profit entities and University of Bari that aims at monitoring hate speech against minorities in Italy. Within the current experience, we created a data annotation platformspecifically dedicated to support educational activities and aimed at reflecting on the importance of a conscientious communication. In this perspective,the idea of #DeactivHate takes hold. This laboratory, addressed at students of secondary schools,is articulated in three main modules with the purpose of:  1) raising awareness about this social problem, encouraging the reflection on microaggressions, hate speech, stereotypes,   prejudices;   2) stimulating the so-called computational thinking and the study of linguistic elements that are exploited by users to offend or to express hate against a victim online (hashtags, emoticons, or figures of speech);   3) introducing high schoolers to how tools based on NLP (Natural Language Processing)  work to incentivize a more conscious use of technology.To reach these purposes, We designed a series of educational activities that include: analysis of the online problem by means of an investigation on own social networks personal profiles; linguistic analysis of the hateful messages during the annotation of tweets on the “Contro l’odio” annotation platform; manual identification of hate speech in Italian texts playing the role of `being an automatic classifier'; translation of this task in a real automatic task, coding two types of classifiers in Python. These activities, delivered online due to the pandemic restrictions, have been distributed in 5 meetings (lasting 2 hours each) for each class, between April and June 2021, for a total of 10 hours per class.

Conclusion
#DeactivHate represents for Italian high schoolers a first step towards the introduction to subjects such as Linguistics and NLP, that are, for the most part, unknown in Italian high schools, in spite of their relevance in everyday technology. Indeed, this kind of laboratory reveals what are the possible hybrid and multidisciplinary applications of Computer Science and Linguistics related degrees, far from the conventional employment opportunities.Looking at the future,we would like to enhance the proposed activities in order to make them more interactive even in an online context (such as the DAD) following the example of hiippala2021applied. A final remark needs to be made regarding the lack of evaluative strategies that could allow us to understand the impact of #DeactivHate in students' online behaviors or their knowledge of technologies.Therefore, following the example of bioglio2018social and athanasiades2015internet, in the next editions we have planned to employ: surveys before and after the intervention to evaluate the online activity of the students and their experiences about misbehavior (caused or suffered); and interviews to teachers after the conclusion of the laboratory to understand if some changes were perceived with respect to the class group. Future activities will integrate also basic evaluations to assess the degree of learning with respect to the contents of the course, such as computational thinking, annotation methodologies, automatic text processing, as well as a final evaluation of the proposed teaching activities collecting the personal impressions of the students.In addition, to validate also the impact of #DeactivHate in the society and, in particular, in the city contextwe think to measure thedetection of the amount of hateful message online by means of monitoring platforms, such as the “Contro l’odio” map.[<https://mappa.controlodio.it/>.]