Othering, the act of portraying outgroups as fundamentally different from the ingroup, often escalates into framing them as existential threats--fueling intergroup conflict and justifying exclusion and violence. These dynamics are alarmingly pervasive, spanning from the extreme historical examples of genocides against minorities in Germany and Rwanda to the ongoing violence and rhetoric targeting migrants in the US and Europe. While concepts like hate speech and fear speech have been explored in existing literature, they capture only part of this broader and more nuanced dynamic which can often be harder to detect, particularly in online speech and propaganda. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel computational framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to quantify othering across diverse contexts, extending beyond traditional linguistic indicators of hostility. Applying the model to real-world data from Telegram war bloggers and political discussions on Gab reveals how othering escalates during conflicts, interacts with moral language, and garners significant attention, particularly during periods of crisis. Our framework, designed to offer deeper insights into othering dynamics, combines with a rapid adaptation process to provide essential tools for mitigating othering's adverse impacts on social cohesion.

In India, people identify with a particular group based on certain attributes such as religion. The same religious groups are often provoked against each other. Previous studies show the role of provocation in increasing tensions between India's two prominent religious groups: Hindus and Muslims. With the advent of the Internet, such provocation also surfaced on social media platforms such as WhatsApp. By leveraging an existing dataset of Indian WhatsApp posts, we identified three categories of provoking sentences against Indian Muslims. Further, we labeled 7,000 sentences for three provocation categories and called this dataset PACO. We leveraged PACO to train a model that can identify provoking sentences from a WhatsApp post. Our best model is fine-tuned RoBERTa and achieved a 0.851 average AUC score over five-fold cross-validation. Automatically identifying provoking sentences could stop provoking text from reaching out to the masses, and can prevent possible discrimination or violence against the target religious group. Further, we studied the provocative speech through a pragmatic lens, by identifying the dialog acts and impoliteness super-strategies used against the religious group.

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.

WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app in the world. Due to its popularity, WhatsApp has become a powerful and cheap tool for political campaigning being widely used during the 2019 Indian general election, where it was used to connect to the voters on a large scale. Along with the campaigning, there have been reports that WhatsApp has also become a breeding ground for harmful speech against various protected groups and religious minorities. Many such messages attempt to instil fear among the population about a specific (minority) community. According to research on inter-group conflict, such `fear speech' messages could have a lasting impact and might lead to real offline violence. In this paper, we perform the first large scale study on fear speech across thousands of public WhatsApp groups discussing politics in India. We curate a new dataset and try to characterize fear speech from this dataset. We observe that users writing fear speech messages use various events and symbols to create the illusion of fear among the reader about a target community. We build models to classify fear speech and observe that current state-of-the-art NLP models do not perform well at this task. Fear speech messages tend to spread faster and could potentially go undetected by classifiers built to detect traditional toxic speech due to their low toxic nature. Finally, using a novel methodology to target users with Facebook ads, we conduct a survey among the users of these WhatsApp groups to understand the types of users who consume and share fear speech. We believe that this work opens up new research questions that are very different from tackling hate speech which the research community has been traditionally involved in.