Violence-Inducing Behaviour Prevention in Social-Cyber Space of Local Communities (SOCYTI)

There is a need to assess and mitigate the dynamic risks associated with the social environment through malicious behaviour online such as spreading hate and misinformation on social media. Such behaviours significantly harm people’s response efforts of during disasters, and thus, local community services require tools to timely monitor risks to resilience from social environment.

In this project our primary objective is to develop advanced methods for monitoring and preventing such malicious behaviour on the Internet, through utilizing artificial intelligence or big data technologies in new manners. The project will analyse social media data, by taking in account all ethical, social, and legal challenges and considerations, in contrast to traditional survey-based analytical approaches. The project will firmly contribute to the Norwegian government’s strategy and initiatives against online hate speech and hate crime.

The project has a potential to impact the everyday lives of citizens, their well-being with huge social impact, and also has the potential to contribute to the United Nations’ sustainable development goals. Stakeholder representatives will be involved at all stages of the project. The project consortium consists of three partners from Norway and one international partner from the USA with complementary expertise covering all aspects of the project.

Community resilience has increasingly become a priority for local and regional authorities as well as for national governments. Available tools to support resilience initiatives of the local community services lack the ability to assess and mitigate the dynamic risks associated with malicious public behaviour online such as spreading hate and misinformation on social media, which can significantly harm official response efforts during disasters in their communities.

A variety of large-scale social media datasets, collaborative mapping tools, and data science approaches have emerged that can facilitate computational social science research to gain a better understanding of community resilience processes accounting for public behaviour and design actionable tools for the community services.

In the SOCYTI project our key objective is to investigate how to improve community resilience, primarily using a principled approach of social cybersecurity, by developing methods and tools to timely inform the Norwegian community services for proactive interventions at scale regarding violence-inducing behaviours online, i.e. the risks to societal atmosphere (e.g., violence-inducing behaviours of online hate speech, violence, and abuse against women on social media). The project will conduct large-scale analytics on big data sources, taking in account all ethical, social, and legal (privacy and data protection) challenges for data management. This approach differs significantly from existing approaches consisting of only small-scale human observations, or survey-based analytical approaches.

The project has the potential to impact the everyday lives of citizens and their well-being with huge social impact and will also contribute positively to the UN sustainable development goals, namely SDGs 11-16-17.

Stakeholder representatives will be involved at all stages of the project. The project consortium consists of three partners from Norway and one international partner from the USA with complementary expertise covering all aspects of the project.