UTM Sociology Speaker Series: Thomas Davidson

The Department of Sociology at UTM would like to cordially invite you to our third Speaker Series event of the academic year. 

This month, the Department of Sociology is hosting Thomas Davidson, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. 

Dr. Davidson will be providing a talk on “Hate Speech in Context: A Sociological Approach to Online Content Moderation.” In this talk, Dr. Davidson examines why well-intentioned moderation systems can lead to unintended discrimination. Social media platforms employ workers and automated systems to screen content, helping remove offensive material but also exhibit racial biases and suppressing legitimate speech. This talk examines why systems meant to protect marginalized groups can result in unintended discrimination, using a conjoint experiment and a study with vision language models. Presented by Thomas Davidson, who studies far-right activism, right-wing populism, and online hate speech using computational and statistical techniques. 

🗓️ Date: March 16, 2026 

🕛 Time: 3pm - 5pm 

📍 Location: MN3230 

Click here to register 

Refreshments will be provided!