# Confronting Abusive Language Online: A Survey from the Ethical and Human Rights Perspective

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.12305 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12305/

## Key facts

- Cited by 43 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 22 Dec 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Societal Biases in Language Generation: Progress and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04054/) (2021)
- [Human-in-the-Loop for Data Collection: a Multi-Target Counter Narrative Dataset to Fight Online Hate Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08720/) (2021)
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- [Human-Machine Collaboration Approaches to Build a Dialogue Dataset for Hate Speech Countering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03433/) (2022)
- [Your fairness may vary: Pretrained language model fairness in toxic text classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01250/) (2021)
- [GPT4Video: A Unified Multimodal Large Language Model for lnstruction-Followed Understanding and Safety-Aware Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16511/) (2023)
- [Using Pre-Trained Language Models for Producing Counter Narratives Against Hate Speech: a Comparative Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01440/) (2022)
- [Navigating LLM Ethics: Advancements, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18841/) (2024)
- [Disentangling Perceptions of Offensiveness: Cultural and Moral Correlates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06861/) (2023)
- [NLP for Counterspeech against Hate: A Survey and How-To Guide](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20103/) (2024)
- [Necessity and Sufficiency for Explaining Text Classifiers: A Case Study in Hate Speech Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03302/) (2022)
- [Hate Speech Criteria: A Modular Approach to Task-Specific Hate Speech Definitions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.15455/) (2022)
- [Dynamic Forecasting of Conversation Derailment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05111/) (2021)
- [Improving Generalizability in Implicitly Abusive Language Detection with Concept Activation Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02261/) (2022)
- [Mitigating Covertly Unsafe Text within Natural Language Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09306/) (2022)
- [Countering Online Hate Speech: An NLP Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02941/) (2021)
- [Hate Speech Classifiers Learn Human-Like Social Stereotypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14839/) (2021)
- [D3CODE: Disentangling Disagreements in Data across Cultures on Offensiveness Detection and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10857/) (2024)
- [KidLM: Advancing Language Models for Children -- Early Insights and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03884/) (2024)
- [A Modular Taxonomy for Hate Speech Definitions and Its Impact on Zero-Shot LLM Classification Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18576/) (2025)
- [Foveate, Attribute, and Rationalize: Towards Physically Safe and Trustworthy AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09667/) (2022)
- [Undesirable Biases in NLP: Addressing Challenges of Measurement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13709/) (2022)
- [The crime of being poor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14128/) (2023)
- [Quantifying Stereotypes in Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15535/) (2024)
- [Exploring Boundaries and Intensities in Offensive and Hate Speech: Unveiling the Complex Spectrum of Social Media Discourse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12042/) (2024)
- [Northeastern Uni at Multilingual Counterspeech Generation: Enhancing Counter Speech Generation with LLM Alignment through Direct Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15453/) (2024)
- [Leveraging World Knowledge in Implicit Hate Speech Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14100/) (2022)
- [GPT-HateCheck: Can LLMs Write Better Functional Tests for Hate Speech Detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15238/) (2024)
- [Toxicity in Online Platforms and AI Systems: A Survey of Needs, Challenges, Mitigations, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25539/) (2025)
- [Interactive Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00908/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The pervasiveness of abusive content on the internet can lead to severe psychological and physical harm. Significant effort in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research has been devoted to addressing this problem through abusive content detection and related sub-areas, such as the detection of hate speech, toxicity, cyberbullying, etc. Although current technologies achieve high classification performance in research studies, it has been observed that the real-life application of this technology can cause unintended harms, such as the silencing of under-represented groups. We review a large body of NLP research on automatic abuse detection with a new focus on ethical challenges, organized around eight established ethical principles: privacy, accountability, safety and security, transparency and explainability, fairness and non-discrimination, human control of technology, professional responsibility, and promotion of human values. In many cases, these principles relate not only to situational ethical codes, which may be context-dependent, but are in fact connected to universal human rights, such as the right to privacy, freedom from discrimination, and freedom of expression. We highlight the need to examine the broad social impacts of this technology, and to bring ethical and human rights considerations to every stage of the application life-cycle, from task formulation and dataset design, to model training and evaluation, to application deployment. Guided by these principles, we identify several opportunities for rights-respecting, socio-technical solutions to detect and confront online abuse, including `nudging', `quarantining', value sensitive design, counter-narratives, style transfer, and AI-driven public education applications.