This article argues that Thomas Hobbes' analysis of insult or ‘contumely’ prefigures recent developments in moral and political philosophy striking ways. Specifically, Hobbes's concerns about the dignitary harms hate speech went well beyond ‘fighting words’ to essential role played by expressions hatred contempt making unmaking social hierarchies. Hobbes’s sensitivity contumely’s subtle power c...

Social media has become an indispensable part of the everyday lives of millions of people around the world. It provides a platform for expressing opinions and beliefs, communicated to a massive audience. However, this ease with which people can express themselves has also allowed for the large scale spread of propaganda and hate speech. To prevent violating the abuse policies of social media pl...

Detection of abusive language in user generated online content has become an issue of increasing importance in recent years. Most current commercial methods make use of blacklists and regular expressions, however these measures fall short when contending with more subtle, less ham-fisted examples of hate speech. In this work, we develop a machine learning based method to detect hate speech on o...

This study examines how people experience hate speech. Specifically, it assesses people’s perceptions regarding both the antecedents and outcomes of such expression targeted at Jews and homosexuals. One hundred twenty university students read (and in some cases also supplied) real-life epithets aimed at their social identity and then provided an assessment of their (a) perceived shortand long-t...