Beginning in the 1980s, the term hate crime became part of the research canon of criminologists across the United States. Researchers have examined the characteristics of hate crime victims, offenders, and offenses. However, little is known about the context of hate crime, and more specifically about the ways that the changing demographics of the United States have contributed to hate crime. Th...

A key challenge for automatic hate-speech detection on social media is the separation of hate speech from other instances of offensive language. Lexical detection methods tend to have low precision because they classify all messages containing particular terms as hate speech and previous work using supervised learning has failed to distinguish between the two categories. We used a crowd-sourced...

Social media systems allow Internet users a congenial platform to freely express their thoughts and opinions. Although this property represents incredible and unique communication opportunities, it also brings along important challenges. Online hate speech is an archetypal example of such challenges. Despite its magnitude and scale, there is a significant gap in understanding the nature of hate...

This paper presents findings from the All Wales Hate Crime Project. Most hate crime research has focused on discrete victim types in isolation. For the first time, internationally, this paper examines the psychological and physical impacts of hate crime across seven victim types drawing on quantitative and qualitative data. It contributes to the hate crime debate in two significant ways: (1) it...

Not since its decision in Wisconsin v. Mitchell, has the United States Supreme Court squarely addressed whether hate crimes legislation regulates protected speech in violation of the First Amendment.1 However, the United States House of Representatives' passage of the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007 ("House Bill 1592" or "Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007") on May 3, 2...

While favouring communications and easing information sharing, Social Network Sites are also used to launch harmful campaigns against specific groups and individuals. Cyberbullism, incitement to self-harm practices, sexual predation are just some of the severe effects of massive online offensives. Moreover, attacks can be carried out against groups of victims and can degenerate in physical viol...

In 2015, the rate of violent hate crime victimization was 0.7 hate crimes per 1,000 persons age 12 or older (figure 1). This rate was not significantly different from the rate in 2004 (0.9 per 1,000).1 The absence of statistically significant change in rates from 2004 to 2015 generally held true for violent hate crimes both reported and unreported to police. However, between 2012 and 2015, the ...

Social media platforms have recently seen an increase in the occurrence of hate speech discourse which has led to calls for improved detection methods. Most of these rely on annotated data, keywords, and a classification technique. While this approach provides good coverage, it can fall short when dealing with new terms produced by online extremist communities which act as original sources of w...

Research on the relationship between community race/ethnic and economic change and the base rates of hate crimes has been rarely studied in the social sciences. The present study examined the role of race/ethnic and economic change in Los Angeles between 1990 and 2000 to determine their relationship to hate crime occurrence. Data collected from Los Angeles hate crime reports, including victim a...

We present an approach to detecting hate speech in online text, where hate speech is defined as abusive speech targeting specific group characteristics, such as ethnic origin, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. While hate speech against any group may exhibit some common characteristics, we have observed that hatred against each different group is typically characterized by the use of a sm...