research question

How are hate speech and free speech related and which are the common topics?

Topics in the debate

Description

Hate speech and Free speech are terms which are often related to each other, as topics of a hot controversy these days. The relation is expressed in many ways through the media, but it became essential the understanding of some relevant features between both of them in order to better define which arguments are the most used in the debate. With this aim the research question brought us to Wikipedia, in order to identify the references for each topics and the "See Also" pages related to them.

As a result, the graph shows the starting references with principle nodes on the map concerning the main topics of Hate speech and Free speech, while dependent layers for the connected results. From the visualization arise which are the pages in common between the sources: “Shouting fire in a crowded theater”; “Freedom of thought”; “Blasphemy laws”; “Political correctness”. Collecting these results by their overall topic, it is possible to define which are the main themes that characterize the debate: Principle of democracy; Legislative implication; Individual behavior.

Secondly, the analysis was carried out in the direction of mapping some of the Hate speech and Free speech terms. In this way it was possible to build an overview of the main topics associated with the debate. To do this, we again used Wikipedia, extracting the keywords from the pages found in the previous display. It has followed a categorization by themes, together with the place of terms in space along two distinct zones at the extremes and a median with common terms. In doing so, a first conceptual map shared by the users of Wikipedia around the controversy has been returned.

Protocol

In order to analyze the common areas between the topics, at first we selected the main four Wikipedia pages about the themes ("Hate speech", "Free speech", "Hate speech in the USA", "Free speech in the USA"), then we linked them in the Seealsology tool and let the analysis start. We imported the results in Gephi, where, after filtering the results, we created the map.

Then, we used again Wikipedia in order to find the pages in direct relation with "hate speech" and "free speech". Once find them out, we manually categorized the concepts and refined the results.