Description
As national governments are revising laws to tackle increasing online hate speech regarded as a pernicious social problem, the development of evolving algorithm approaches to detect digital hate crime has increasingly challenged the rules and logics of judicial action. Law enforcement agencies and officers cooperate with IT-experts who develop software programs as self-learner trained to be capable of distinguishing the criminal data from the non-criminal one. Meanwhile, questions arise concerning the scope and rules of a state’s duty to protect fundamental rights of its citizens: how many hate speeches is the state allowed to ignore? How many of them must an enforcement authority bring to the court? If even the legal experts are not sure of the applicability of old rules towards cyber hatred, what exactly can an algorithm contribute to facilitating analytic tasks while combating cyber hate crime?
Using a mixed methodology of expert interviews and computational criminology that recurs to data science methods, this study highlights how the digital age is changing the outlook of judiciability in Germany between the protection of freedom of speech, the guarantee of social freedom, and data protection in the criminal justice system. The findings see the necessity of a trust-based cooperation between legal enforcement agencies and social media firms for efficient data detection process. The study particularly urges to remap hate crime whose role as a multiplicator in inciting violence and social unrest can no longer be approached through a deduction logic that often downplays its seriousness of the call to violence.
