Confronting Abusive Language Online: A Survey from the Ethical and Human Rights Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The pervasiveness of abusive content on the internet can lead to severe psychological and physical harm. Significant effort in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research has been devoted to addressing this problem through abusive content detection and related sub-areas, such as the detection of hate speech, toxicity, cyberbullying, etc. Although current technologies achieve high classification performance in research studies, it has been observed that the real-life application of this technology can cause unintended harms, such as the silencing of under-represented groups. We review a large body of NLP research on automatic abuse detection with a new focus on ethical challenges, organized around eight established ethical principles: privacy, accountability, safety and security, transparency and explainability, fairness and non-discrimination, human control of technology, professional responsibility, and promotion of human values. In many cases, these principles relate not only to situational ethical codes, which may be context-dependent, but are in fact connected to universal human rights, such as the right to privacy, freedom from discrimination, and freedom of expression. We highlight the need to examine the broad social impacts of this technology, and to bring ethical and human rights considerations to every stage of the application life-cycle, from task formulation and dataset design, to model training and evaluation, to application deployment. Guided by these principles, we identify several opportunities for rights-respecting, socio-technical solutions to detect and confront online abuse, including ‘nudging’, ‘quarantining’, value sensitive design, counter-narratives, style transfer, and AI-driven public education applications.evaluation, to application deployment. Guided by these principles, we identify several opportunities for rights-respecting, socio-technical solutions to detect and confront online abuse, including 'nudging', 'quarantining', value sensitive design, counter-narratives, style transfer, and AI-driven public education applications.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.037 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".