Aim of Intervention
“To make teachers aware of a wide range of responses to problematic situations at school and its extended digital space.”
Length of Project
2 years and 1 month
(Nov. 2016 - Dec. 2018)
Offline or Online Problem
Online
“Raising the awareness of pupils, students, teachers and parents about possible threats and risks associated with the use of the internet and modern digital tools should include sensitization through workshops, courses, lectures and various forms of experiential learning the role of school social workers extends into teaching responsible use of digital tools.”
Who is Behind this
Piotr Toczyski, Marcin Grudzień, Maciej Sopyło
How does the Project Work
** action-based research
~ Trainees: role of decision-makers (to save or delete content) on the entries already present on the internet forum
• Their task: retain or delete proposed entries; discussions are used for analysis too
~~ decision-making exercise:
• “Leave – Delete” → an activity to raise awareness of some of the premises that may form the basis for decisions related to responding or not responding to hate speech
• Participants played the role of the administrator of the website and had to decide within a minute or so whether or not to delete or save an online entry
• The decision is made either individually or in small groups, then there is a mini discussion, followed by casting a vote (to retain or delete) aloud
• Then, a moderated discussion to weigh the argument
• This discussion is meant to give “insight into the current state of participants’ awareness”
Stages / Evaluative Measurements
• Several entries repeated during each training
• The trainees decide in small groups, pairs or individually whether to delete or accept each entry, followed by discussion
• Entries copied from real, online discussions from Polish mainstream online media user-generated content sections
—------> Online Entry 1: “Europe for the White, Africa for HIV”
• Analysis shows that participants agree it should be removed from public media space
• “Racist entry,” “discrimination,” labeling,” “stereotyping,” “rejection,” “insult”
—------> Online Entry 2: “You MUST love the Jews. You can’t even be indifferent to them or even have sympathy for them. NO. You must love them because otherwise you will be called an anti-Semitic.”
• A discussion defined this as: hateful, but also neutral
• “Rhetorical procedure,” “voice in discussion,” “ironic entry,” “sarcasm,” “an ordinary voice in opinion without exerting any pressure on anyone.”
• Discussion of caps: “MUST” and “NO” seen as a form of coercion – coercion of writer’s positive feelings toward a group, but the receiver’s lack of positive feelings would be expressive of aversion
—------> Online Entry 3: “Speak for yourself, stupid.”
• Deletion = preventive solution
• “Offensive,” “humiliating the speaker,” “crossing borders”
• High power of destruction
—------> Online Entry 4: “I prefer to live next to a Jew rather than a Pole, because the Jew will not set the Radio Maryja to the max.”
• Humorous, does not offend anyone directly, difficulty to decide on whether or not to delete because of “truthfulness” of entry
• Argument to remove is because of “unacceptable violation and wounding of religious feelings of the confessors of Catholicism or Judaism, or the community of numerous listeners of Catholic Radio Maryja
• Participants showed lack of awareness of history of anti-semitism
—------> Online Entry 5a: “A robbery is nothing like that? Let somebody on the street attack you, I wish you, then we will talk!” &&& Online Entry 5b: “Let someone r*pe his daughter.”
• The exercise was preformed in two variants – 5a&5b were presented at the same time or separately
• 5a – treated as a rhetorical procedure ironic voice in the discussion w/ limited power of destruction toward the recipient
• Not wishful, not a call for violence, but it might offend someone or expose them to unpleasant emotions
• 5b – “incitement to crime,” “a wish for harm to a close person”
• May concern a specific person and is a crime
Following:
• A joint attempt to define the examples
• “To match abstract ideas such as hejt and hate speech, knowledge of the difference between them and an attempt to apply such knowledge fluently”
• Last phase: “a return to the examples and often a symbolic tearing up of those that the groups considered hate speech or for other reasons necessary to be removed from the internet”
What Works / Doesn’t Work?
W:
• Deciphering explicit hate speech
DW:
• No guarantee that this experiment will affect social workers in the longer-term
• This population is specific to Poland, this experiment should be executed in other countries
Advantage of Intervention
Online
Increased attention to society awareness in the digital world
Learning how to recognize and decipher hate speech & offensive language
What we Learn
Digital language skills and language sensitivity needs greater attention – internet inequalities are increasingly apparent
What we can Generalize
• “Debates on the emergence of new standards have big social consequences.”
• “The fate of a young pupil may depend on the [correct classification of an event] undertaken by a school social worker.”
• “This type of work should result in a more empathic communication with others, minimizing messages that can be categorized as either hejt or hate speech.”
