Speech Fear Research Articles

“You are doomed!" Crisis-specific and Dynamic Use of Fear Speech in Protest and Extremist Radical Social Movements

Social media messages can elicit emotional reactions and mobilize users. Strategic utilization of emotionally charged messages, particularly those inducing fear, potentially nurtures a climate of threat and hostility online. Coined fear speech (FS), such communication deliberately portrays certain entities as imminently harmful and drives the perception of a threat, especially when the topic is already crisis-laden. Despite the notion that FS and the resulting climate of threat can serve as a justification for radical attitudes and behavior toward outgroups, research on the prevalence, nature, and context of FS is still scarce. The current paper aims to close this gap and provides a definition of FS, its theoretical foundations, and a starting point for (automatically) detecting FS on social media. The paper presents the results of a manual as well as an automated content analysis of three broadly categorized actor types within a larger radical German Telegram messaging sphere (2.9 million posts). With a rather conservative classification approach, we analyzed the prevalence and distribution of FS for more than five years in relation to six crisis-specific topics. A substantial proportion between 21% and 34% within the observed communication of radical/extremist actors was classified as FS. Additionally, the relative amount of FS was found to increase with the overall posting frequency. This underscores FS's potential as an indicator for radicalization dynamics and crisis escalation.

On the rise of fear speech in online social media

Recently, social media platforms are heavily moderated to prevent the spread of online hate speech, which is usually fertile in toxic words and is directed toward an individual or a community. Owing to such heavy moderation, newer and more subtle techniques are being deployed. One of the most striking among these is fear speech. Fear speech, as the name suggests, attempts to incite fear about a target community. Although subtle, it might be highly effective, often pushing communities toward a physical conflict. Therefore, understanding their prevalence in social media is of paramount importance. This article presents a large-scale study to understand the prevalence of 400K fear speech and over 700K hate speech posts collected from Gab.com. Remarkably, users posting a large number of fear speech accrue more followers and occupy more central positions in social networks than users posting a large number of hate speech. They can also reach out to benign users more effectively than hate speech users through replies, reposts, and mentions. This connects to the fact that, unlike hate speech, fear speech has almost zero toxic content, making it look plausible. Moreover, while fear speech topics mostly portray a community as a perpetrator using a (fake) chain of argumentation, hate speech topics hurl direct multitarget insults, thus pointing to why general users could be more gullible to fear speech. Our findings transcend even to other platforms (Twitter and Facebook) and thus necessitate using sophisticated moderation policies and mass awareness to combat fear speech.

Addressing The Demonstrable Effects of Anti-Vax FEAR* Speech With Mandated Public- Health Education and Government Speech (*False, Endangering and Reckless)

The 2018-2019 measles epidemic was the worst the world has seen in 30 years, manifesting in increased morbidity, mortality, hospitalizations, and public health expenditures. Public Health officials and legal scholars attribute the rise to the emergence of organized and well-funded anti-vax groups, who disseminate false, endangering, and reckless “propaganda” (what I call FEAR speech) with the objective of fostering vaccine resistance. We are on track for similar resistance should a CoVid vaccine become a reality. To date, quantitative demonstration of cause and effect data is wanting. This research fills that gap, the first such research to do so via a systematic methodology. Using a novel approach, I explore the role of anti-vax groups in five localities, comparing recent measles epidemics with earlier epidemics in the same localities, also establishing that pamphleteering and conferences/symposia have been the most effective dissemination means for targeting insular communities.After evaluating several proposals to deal with the threat presented by these groups, including imposing tort liability and counter-speech, and concluding they are or will be ineffective, I propose a novel means of redress. After first determining that government speech would be be a viable approach, I advocate mandated educational curricula under this umbrella, targeted at the high school level and include a sample lesson plan outline.

When Public Health Is Eroded by Junk Science: Muzzling Anti-Vaxxer FEAR Speech - And the First Amendment

The 2018-2019 measles epidemic was the worst the world (and the US) had seen in almost 30 years, manifesting in increased morbidity, mortality, hospitalizations, and public health expenditures. Public Health officials and legal scholars attribute the rise to the emergence of organized and well-funded anti-vax groups. These groups disseminate false, endangering and reckless propaganda (what I call FEAR speech) with the objective of fostering vaccine resistance. Pamphleteering and conferences/symposia sponsored by these groups have been blamed for successfully persuaded a vulnerable public that vaccination is dangerous. The World Health Organization lists these groups among the top five public health threats. This is the first article to document the influence of anti-vax activities in stoking the explosiveness of four recent virulent epidemics in the developed world (three in the US and Israel) by comparing the most recent epidemics with ones occurring within the last decade in the same locality and then propose a novel legal solution to address the anti-vax threat. While five states have legislatively removed non-medical exemptions to the nationally required pre-school vaccination, that number has stalled, suggesting rising vaccine resistance, and increasing vulnerability. I therefore propose that controlling FEAR speech would be the best method to foster vaccine compliance, noting that to do so would trespass on conventional first amendment protections. The article then suggests various means of overcoming constitutional restrictions before proposing a novel methodology to address this emerging concern: content-neutral legislation that would extend the Daubert standard of evaluating scientific assertions to those made in the public domain when the objective is to influence public conduct in a manner deleterious to the national health, safety, and security.

Modification of Prosody for Emotion Conversion using Gaussian Regression Model

Emotion conversion is one of the most inspiring forefronts of research in the arena of emotional speech synthesis. The main focus of the work is to convert a neutral speech sentence to the target emotional speech sentence using signal processing techniques. The parameters used for emotion conversion are pitch contour and intensity along with the duration of the sentence. Kannada Emotional Speech (KES) Database is created and used for analysis. The database consists of 4 (sadness, happy, anger, and fear) emotions with neutral. The pitch contour of different emotional sentences are analyzed and Gaussian Regression Model (GRM) is proposed for predicting the target pitch contour. The evaluation of the proposed method is done using Objective test & Subjective test. For objective test, mean pitch, the standard deviation of pitch, mean intensity and duration of the sentences are used. Evaluation using a subjective test is performed by calculating Emotion Recognition Rate (ERR) with the help of confusion matrix and also by taking the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) rating of the conversion system on the scale of 1-5. The result of Subjective test indicates that the effectiveness and discernment of emotion are improved when GRM is used for pitch contour modification with intensity and duration. The most recognized emotion was sadness with MOS of 3.52 and ERR of 83% and the least recognized emotion was anger with MOS of 1.74 and ERR of 66%. The results of the subjective and objective test show that the converted sadness, happy and fear speech is seeming very close to usual sadness, anger and fear emotion.

Direct hate speech vs. indirect fear speech. A multimodal critical discourse analysis of the Sun’s editorial "1 in 5 Brit Muslims’ sympathy for jihadis"

After the 2015 Paris attacks, hate speech against Muslims gathered momentum and further legitimized in popular media outlets across Europe. After “decades of sustained and unrestrained anti-foreigner abuse, misinformation and distortion”, the United Nations accused some British newspapers of “hate speech” (ECRI 2016). Following on previous research (Sindoni 2016, 2017), this paper sets out to investigate how hate speech in mainstream British media is constructed both verbally and multimodally, with particular reference to the investigation of rhetoric inducing anti-Muslim and Islamophobic hatred. The paper adopts a multimodal critical discourse framework of analysis (Fairclough 2000; Machin, Mayr 2012). As a case study, the “1 in 5 Brit Muslims’ sympathy for jihadis” The Sun ’s editorial reporting on a poll conducted by Survation and related multimodal materials will be investigated with a view to unearthing 1) linguistic strategies, such as classification of social actors, including, but not limited to, personalisation vs. impersonalisation, data aggregation, and structural opposition (van Leeuwen 1996; van Dijk 1993b); 2) visual strategies (Kress, van Leeuwen 2006; Bednarek, Caple 2012, 2015), including representational techniques (e.g. reactional processes, dimensional and quantitative topography), interactive perspectives, and organisational distribution of visual items. Considering the combination of linguistic and visual news value (Bell 1991; Bednarek, Caple 2014), the paper will ultimately suggest that 1) resources need to be investigated in their reciprocal interplay to scrutinize the covert agenda of media outlets that may promote indirect forms of hate speech and that 2) less explicit forms of hate speech are no less dangerous than explicit incitement to racial hatred in that they can foster a siege mentality by drawing on an us/them rhetoric.

Fear emotion classification in speech by acoustic and behavioral cues

Machine-based emotional speech classification has become a requirement for natural and familiar human-computer interactions. Because emotional speech recognition systems use a person’s voice to spontaneously detect their emotional status and take subsequent appropriate actions, they can be used widely for various reason in call centers and emotional based media services. Emotional speech recognition systems are primarily developed using emotional acoustic data. While there are several emotional acoustic databases available for emotion recognition systems in other countries, there is currently no real situational data related to the “fear emotion” available. Thus, in this study, we collected acoustic data recordings which represent real urgent and fearful situations from an emergency call center. To classify callers’ emotions more accurately, we also included the additional behavioral feature “interjection” which can be classified as a type of disfluency which arises due to cognitive dysfunction observed in spontaneous speech when a speaker gets hyperemotional. We used Support Vector Machines (SVM), with the interjections feature, as well as conventionally used acoustic features (i.e., F0 variability, voice intensity variability, and Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients; MFCCs) to identify which emotional category acoustic data fell into. The results of our study revealed that the MFCC was the best acoustic feature for spontaneous fear speech classification. In addition, we demonstrated the validity of behavioral features as an important criteria for emotional classification improvement.

Words of Violence: “Fear Speech,” or How Violent Conflict Escalation Relates to the Freedom of Expression

The limits of the freedom of expression are a perennial discussion in human rights discourse. This article focuses on identifying yardsticks to establish the boundaries of freedom of expression in cases where violence is a risk. It does so by using insights from the social sciences on the escalation of violent conflict. By emphasizing the interaction between violence and discourse, and its effect on antagonisms between groups, it offers an interdisciplinary perspective on an ongoing legal debate. It introduces the notion of “fear speech” and argues that it may be much more salient in this context than hate speech.