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, explores the pressing issue of moderating online extremism in her upcoming book, "Safe Havens for Hate." In this discussion, she reveals how varying moderation standards across social media platforms create exploitable safe havens for extremist groups. Mitts delves into the tactics these groups use to evade moderation and the emotional impact of bans on users. She also discusses the potential risks of unified content moderation efforts and identifies crucial areas for future research.

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INSIGHT

Why Study Online Extremism

Tamar Mitts studied online extremism to understand why societies struggle to address violent and hateful content despite connectivity gains.
She frames the problem as new technical and regulatory challenges layered on old social issues, motivating cross-platform analysis.

INSIGHT

Three Lenses On Extremism

Mitts defines extremism across three lenses: deviation from majority, intergroup harm, and promotion of violence.
She studies actors labeled extremist by states to analyze how moderation is applied, not to normatively judge them.

INSIGHT

Size-Based Regulation Creates Gaps

Democratic governments focus regulation on the largest platforms using size thresholds like monthly active users.
This creates differential regulation where smaller platforms face fewer rules, shaping the moderation landscape.

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Content moderation on social media has become one of the most daunting challenges of our time. Nowhere is the need for action more urgent than in the fight against terrorism and extremism. Yet despite mass content takedowns, account suspensions, and mounting pressure on technology companies to do more, hate thrives online. Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of Moderating Online Extremism (Princeton University Press, 2025) looks at how content moderation shapes the tactics of harmful content producers on a wide range of social media platforms.
Drawing on a wealth of original data on more than a hundred militant and hate organizations around the world, Dr. Tamar Mitts shows how differing moderation standards across platforms create safe havens that allow these actors to organize, launch campaigns, and mobilize supporters. She reveals how the structure of the information environment shapes the cross-platform activity of extremist organizations and movements such as the Islamic State, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and QAnon, and highlights the need to consider the online ecosystem, not just individual platforms, when developing strategies to combat extremism.
Taking readers to the frontlines of the digital battleground where dangerous organizations operate, Safe Havens for Hate sheds critical light on how governments and technology companies grapple with the tension between censorship and free speech when faced with violence, hate, and extremism.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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