Professor Paolo Mancini, University in Perugia, stressed the dramatic consequences of the digital revolution, which, in his view, implies the transfer of functions and powers from established institutions (such as the state, parties, including news outlets and agencies) to individually dispersed citizens. He defines this process of change as de-institutionalization. This transformation has consequences in many fields, especially in the field of politics and communications. As for the latter, social media (blogs, Twitter, etc.) allow the citizens themselves to spread news and opinions without any fixed and defined rules, procedures and controls. The phenomenon of fake news, hate speech and the like must be placed within the framework of this broader notion of the process of change.
Bertram Vidgen of the renowned Alan Turing Institute stated: “Online hatred is a “tricky problem.” It threatens to make online space inaccessible, undesirable and unsafe – but there are no simple answers to the question of how this problem should be addressed. Artificial intelligence is often attributed to the epithet of magical means and solutions, but reality is far more complex.”
In the official part of the programme, forty authors and scientists from eleven countries – Italy, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Serbia, Spain, Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Sweden and Croatia presented their works. The gathering continued in the unofficial part of the program – a costumed tour of the city called Gornjogradske coprnice.
Freedom of expression on social media, role of media reporting in and about the coronavirus pandemic and vaccination against the coronavirus, unacceptable speech towards women in reader comments on Croatian news portals, disinformation and media pluralism, recognition and prevention of hate speech in the media, study of state-of-the-art natural language processing models for efficient, automatic detection of hate speech, measuring political sentiment through analysis of comments on YouTube platform, (not) culture of comments on LGBT community texts by citizens are just some of the topics discussed at this conference.
