Echoes of Fear: Unraveling the Presence of Fear Speech in Social Media Platforms @CyberVSR

Abstract

Social media has become an integral part of our everyday life. It allows the rapid dissemination of information and opinions. However, sometimes people use such media to express a range of phenomena that often overlap and intersect, and include a variety of types of speech that cause different harms. Such speech is collectively known as harmful speech. In this talk, we will focus on an important form of harmful speech - fear speech. We will try to explore the prevalence of fear speech across two different platforms - Gab and Whatsapp and two different countries -US and India. Our analysis further compares fear speech with the well-known concept of hate speech. Our findings necessitates the creation of better moderation policies which can handle such complex phenomena as well.