Introducing the Privacy-HSD Trade-off: Hate Speech Detection, but not at the Cost of Privacy

Stephen Meisenbacher, Vlad Gabuz, Chirill Donos, Maxim Dnestreanschii, Gabriel Creanga, Andreea-Elena Bodea, Thomas Lampert, Jana Diesner


Abstract
Hate speech is a real and timely threat that affects a large portion of online users, especially youth and minority groups. While building reliable and robust automatic hate speech detection (HSD) systems is paramount, we argue that this must also be balanced with the individual right to privacy. Exploring the intersection of HSD and privacy, we demonstrate that HSD systems might unintentionally achieve performance at the cost of encoding authorship, posing a threat to privacy. Building on these findings, we establish the notion of a privacy-HSD trade-off, which demands a careful balance. We benchmark a series of text privatization methods, as well as our newly proposed domain-specific AgnoSpeech technique, showing that balancing privacy and HSD is difficult but feasible. The findings make a strong case for more research on the trade-offs between privacy and HSD, both of which have tangible implications for the safeguarding of online participation.
Anthology ID:
2026.woah-1.32
Volume:
Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH)
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Agostina Calabrese, Thomas Davidson, Christine de Kock, Urja Khurana, Marta Marchiori Manerba, Paloma Piot, Zeerak Talat
Venues:
WOAH | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
361–373
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.woah-1.32/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Stephen Meisenbacher, Vlad Gabuz, Chirill Donos, Maxim Dnestreanschii, Gabriel Creanga, Andreea-Elena Bodea, Thomas Lampert, and Jana Diesner. 2026. Introducing the Privacy-HSD Trade-off: Hate Speech Detection, but not at the Cost of Privacy. In Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH), pages 361–373, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Introducing the Privacy-HSD Trade-off: Hate Speech Detection, but not at the Cost of Privacy (Meisenbacher et al., WOAH 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.woah-1.32.pdf
Supplementarymaterial:
 2026.woah-1.32.SupplementaryMaterial.zip