New Books in Sociology Tamar Mitts, "Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of Moderating Online Extremism" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Oct 31, 2025
Tamar Mitts is an Associate Professor at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, specializing in online extremism. She discusses the urgent challenge of content moderation in combating hate online. Mitts reveals how varying platform standards create safe havens for extremist groups like the Islamic State and QAnon. She explains the tactics these groups use to evade bans and choose platforms strategically, such as Telegram. Mitts also explores the implications of centralized moderation efforts and the risks of losing free speech in the fight against extremism.
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Extremism Is A Fluid, Contextual Label
- Extremism is fluid and defined differently across traditions and societies rather than a single fixed category.
- Mitts studies actors labeled extremist to see how content moderation applies once societies tag them as such.
Regulation Often Favors Platform Size
- Democracies often regulate platforms by size, targeting large platforms with stricter rules and exempting smaller ones.
- This size-based regulation creates predictable differences in moderation across the platform ecosystem.
Uneven Moderation Creates Safe Havens
- Larger platforms tend to adopt more restrictive moderation policies while smaller platforms are more lenient.
- That systematic unevenness enables extremist actors to exploit lenient spaces across the ecosystem.
