Online Abuse and Human Rights: WOAH Satellite Session at R ights C on 2020 (2020)

Abstract: In 2020 The Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH) held a satellite panel at RightsCons 2020, an international human rights conference. Our aim was to bridge the gap between human rights scholarship and Natural Language Processing (NLP) research communities in tackling online abuse. We report on the discussions that took place, and present an analysis of four key issues which emerged: Problems in tackling online abuse, Solutions, Meta concerns and the Ecosystem of content moderation and research. We argue there is a pressing need for NLP research communities to engage with human rights perspectives, and identify four key ways in which NLP research into online abuse could immediately be enhanced to create better and more ethical solutions.

## introduction the workshop on online abuse and harms (woah foot_0 ), previously known as the abusive language workshop (alw), is a leading publication venue for cutting-edge computational research on detecting, analysing and tackling online abuse, primarily using natural language processing (nlp) techniques. over the past three iterations, woah has built an interdisciplinary community of computer scientists, social scientists, critical theorists, legal scholars and more. continuing this tradition of embracing interdisciplinarity, for woah 2020 we organized a satellite panel at rightscon 2020, one of the leading international human rights conferences. it brings together business leaders, technologists, academics, journalists and government representatives to discuss pressing issues at the intersection of human rights and technology. @xcite as an area directly concerned with protecting under-represented, vulnerable and marginalised communities, we anticipated that nlp research into online abuse would benefit from engaging directly with human rights scholarship. human rights offers a powerful way of motivating work in this area, understanding what is at stake with online hate (and efforts to counter it) and bridging the gap between engineering/computational work and the groups that are affected by abuse. a global human rights framework could provide a much needed value system for work on tackling online abuse, furnishing nlp researchers with much-needed frameworks, theories and concepts. yet, to date, research on online abuse published at woah/alw and other leading nlp venues has largely lacked an explicit connection to human rights or an engagement with human rights scholarship. similarly, we believe the human rights scholarship and activism could also benefit from a shared understanding of the problem space which technologists working on nlp-based solutions for tackling online abuse operate in -exploring both the opportunities and limitations of such approaches. more collaboration and dialogue could also foster more useful and critical discussions of how engineering solutions are designed and implemented, helping to ensure that nlp tools have a positive impact on society. in the satellite session at rightscon, we brought together human rights experts with computer scientists in an effort to formulate a rights respecting approach to tackling online abuse. @xcite our objective was to bridge the gap between these communities as a way to drive new initiatives and outlooks, ultimately leading to better and more responsible ways of moderating online content. the intended outcomes of the panel were: the purpose this report is to summarize the panel and reflect on the outcomes. a one-hour discussion session has been allocated during the woah 2020 program to reflect on the report and the rightscon panel. participants the session had 113 rightscon attendees (including organizers and panelists). session structure initially, three questions were posed to the panelists (shared in advance and decided by the organizers). each panelist was requested to answer at least one of the three questions in their 10-15 minute opening statement: we then opened the floor for questions from attendees. they were curated and given to the moderator in real time. this lasted for 15 minutes, after which the panel concluded. ## analysis and synthesis we transcribed the panel using automated software and then manually checked the manuscript. we used an inductive approach of qualitative text analysis to analyze the transcript in order to identify recurring topics (thomas, 2006). we found over a couple of dozen recurring topics that were brought up by the panellists at least twice during the discussion. these recurring topics were then analysed and iteratively refined and merged together to identify four high-level themes: problems, solutions, meta considerations, and ecosystem. ## discussion our rightscons session is just the starting point for a wider set of conversations which need to take place between technologists, engineers and civil society. numerous shortcomings in how platforms moderate content and nlp research is conducted have been identified throughout the panel. there is a pressing need for them to be addressed if we are to build systems which meaningfully tackle online abuse. a human rights based approach is a promising way of bridging the historical and disciplinary divides between these groups but it may not be the only way. we strongly encourage that, aside from anything else, a wider range of perspectives are adopted. from our analysis we identify four main areas which could immediately be tackled by the nlp community to create better and more ethical solutions for online abuse. tackling online abuse is an important task; one that is too important to let disciplinary divides hold back. nlp and other computational approaches have the potential to make an incredibly positive impact on this problem -and are already being used in many settings. but nlp researchers need to move beyond seeing online abuse detection as solely an engineering problem, instead recognizing the social and ethical impetuses that motivate it. human rights frameworks offer a powerful starting point for achieving this. ultimately, it will require far more meaningful dialogue between the engineers and technologists who have largely been responsible for building systems and the groups who are directly affected by them. this report is intended as one step towards achieving this goal.