Covert Hate Speech: White Nationalists and Dog Whistle Communication on Twitter

By P. Bhat, Ofra Klein. 2020

Dog whistling, a form of symbolic communication through seemingly innocuous terms is a common practice for members of far-right movements. This chapter examines how dog whistling was used on Twitter during the 2016 presidential election through a virtual ethnographic approach. Dog whistling serves to circumvent censorship by automated moderation, and adapts historical markers of the far-right as well as symbols used in other media to work within Twitter’s affordances. Thus, Twitter is employed as a channel to spread hate and signal belonging among far-right communities. In doing so, creative use is made of the platform’s technology, in the face of the site’s moderation techniques, to convey white supremacist ideas to a broader audience while staying under the radar of detection.

Subfields: Natural Language Processing, Safety, Robustness & Interpretability

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Recipes for Safety in Open-domain Chatbots (2020, background): “through "dog whistle" communication or coded language) is notably difficult to deal with (Magu et al., 2017; Bhat and Klein, 2020).”