Notoriously Toxic: Understanding the Language and Costs of Hate and Harassment in Online Games

FAIN: HD-229062-15

Georgia State University Research Foundation, Inc. (Atlanta, GA 30302-3999)
Benjamin Joshua Miller (Project Director: September 2014 to April 2022)

A cross-disciplinary workshop and follow-up activities to develop a set of essays and a metadata schema to understand and describe toxic rhetoric in online spaces, with an emphasis on large-scale multiplayer computer games.

A one-year collaboration and two-day working group meeting of scholars from English, Linguistics, Law, Psychology, Education, Game Studies, Communication, and Justice Studies in consultation with industry experts from game development, documenting: 1) best practices for studying and moderating online toxicity, 2) conceptual and legal frameworks for addressing online hate speech, dangerous speech, and toxic speech, 3) patterns of toxic language in digital media, 4) next steps for building a reference corpus of toxicity types and a descriptive taxonomy, and 5) a humanistic perspective on consequences of online toxicity and its moderation procedures.