Across many social media platforms, hateful content against people from both socially disadvantaged (e.g., women, Muslims) and privileged groups (e.g., politicians, journalists, academics) are commonplace and represent a pivotal challenge to societal cohesion. From a scientific standpoint, this digital hate constitutes a complex and dynamic structure, in which various involved actors (broadly and fluidly classified in perpetrators, bystanders, and targets) exhibit unique, yet partially interacting motivations, perceptions, and vulnerabilities. An approach to investigate digital hate thus needs to be multidisciplinary, methodologically versatile, and inclusive of different cultural settings in order to be appropriate. The ERC project Digital Hate: Perpetrators, Audiences, and (Dis)Empowered Targets (DIGIHATE) meets these requirements, examining how different kinds of digital hate emerge, get distributed, and affect others and determining what everyone can do about it.

DIGIHATE will be the first ever project conducted under the umbrella of our department which is funded by the European Research Council through an ERC Advanced Grant. The research will be led by Jörg Matthes as principal investigator, and supported by Kevin Koban as a postdoctoral researcher as well as up to five predoctoral researchers. The project is scheduled to run from January 1, 2023 to December 31, 2027, with the funding totaling to around € 2.500.000.