The following was adapted from this Santa Fe blog post.  At a recent presentation at the Science Writers 2020 conference, Joshua Garland and Mirta Galesic of the Santa Fe Institute presented the first large-scale analysis of tens of millions of instances of hate and counter-hate speech on Twitter. Their findings suggest that organized movements to counteract hate speech on social media are more effective than striking out on one’s own. “I’ve seen this big shift in civil discourse in the last two or three years towards being much more hateful and much more polarized,” says Garland, a mathematician and Applied Complexity Fellow at SFI. “So, for me, an interesting question […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Melanie Mitchell, Professor of Computer Science at Portland State University, and External Professor and Member of the Science Board at the Santa Fe Institute. Melanie is the Director of the Santa Fe Institute’s Complexity Explorer project.  The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) has launched a web-based educational platform, Complexity Explorer. SFI is a private research institute well known for its cross-disciplinary approach to complex systems such as ant colonies, biological cells, economies, and social systems.   The stated mission of the institute is to “discover, comprehend, and communicate the common fundamental principles in complex physical, computational, biological, and social systems that underlie many […]