We are happy to announce the symposium Ha-Ha or Harm? Online Platforms and the Challenges of Moderating Humor, organized by ForHum editorial board member Luisa Fernanda Isaza-Ibarra at the University of Groningen (15:00-17:00 CET, onsite only). Please find more details below.
From memes to AI-generated videos, humorous content plays a major role in our everyday online experiences. However, humor can have several different and contrasting functions, alongside mere entertainment. As shown by a growing body of scholarship, certain types of humor can be used as a way to normalize and spread hateful ideologies, or to deliberately muddy the waters between reliable news and misinformation. On the other hand, humor can also be a powerful way to counter both hate speech and fake news, precisely by means of echoing and ridiculing their tropes.
But how can online platforms draw a line between legitimate and harmful uses of humor? To what extent is it possible to do so at scale, combining human review and automated moderation methods? What are the implications of recent regulatory developments, such as the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and the creation of ODS (Out-of-court Dispute Settlement) bodies? And lastly, can humor be not only an object of content moderation, but also a tool for better understanding regulatory dilemmas? During this ICOG event, these questions will be at the center of three presentations:
- Luisa Fernanda Isaza-Ibarra and Alberto Godioli (University of Groningen) will present some of the key challenges inherent to moderating humorous expression online, drawing on their work within the ForHum and DELIAH projects.
- Our guest speaker Emmanuel Vargas Penagos (Örebro University) will discuss the effectiveness of some potential responses to those challenges, in light of his work on the Human Rights implications of the policies adopted by social media platforms.
- Lorena Flórez Rojas (University of Groningen) will present a game she developed (“Oops, This Content Is Not Available”), which explores content moderation through different stakeholder roles and legal/policy dilemmas, including platform governance, freedom of expression, user rights, safety, and accountability.
The presentations will be followed by an open Q&A.
NB: If you are interested in attending, please sign up via this Google Form.
For any questions, please contact Luisa Fernanda Isaza-Ibarra (l.f.isaza.ibarra@rug.nl).