New Books in Communications Tamar Mitts, "Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of Moderating Online Extremism" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Oct 31, 2025
Tamar Mitts, an Associate Professor at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, dives deep into the precarious world of online extremism. She discusses how different moderation standards create safe havens for hate groups to organize and mobilize, revealing the tactical adaptations they employ to bypass detection. Mitts critiques the varied approaches democracies take in regulating extremist content and raises concerns about potential centralization risks in moderation practices. Her insights illuminate the delicate balance between combating hate and protecting free speech.
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Uneven Moderation Creates Ecosystemic Blind Spots
- Differing moderation standards across platforms create an uneven ecosystem that extremists exploit.
- Studying the cross-platform information environment reveals tactics missed by platform-by-platform approaches.
Platform Size Predicts Moderation Strictness
- Larger platforms tend to adopt more restrictive rules while smaller platforms remain more lenient.
- That predictable size-leniency relationship structures where extremists choose to operate and adapt.
Creative Evasion Of Classifiers
- Extremist actors learn platform classifiers and alter characters, images, and logos to evade detection.
- They invest effort to stay on major platforms because large audiences matter for recruitment and mobilization.
