Online Hate Index in the News
Claudia Von Vacano, a member of BCNM's Executive Committee and and the Executive Director of UC Berkeley's D-Lab and Digital Humanities at Berkeley, recently had her incredible work helping to develop an Online Hate Index featured in the California Magazine.
What began as a discussion with Brittan Heller, then-director of technology and society for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), about harassment against Jewish Journalists resulted in a partnership with the ADL to build a tool using artifical intelligence to battle hate speech. Though major social network and techonology companies have thousands of employees working to identify hate speech and posts, the sheer quantity, combined with the "slippery" quality, means that hate continues to thrive on the internet. The Online Hate Index (OHI) aims to identify hate speech in online posts and has received interest and support from various titans of tech, including Google and Reddit.
From the article:
"We are developing tools to identify hate speech on online platforms, and are not legal experts who are advocating for its removal,” Vacano stated in response to an email query. “We are merely trying to help identify the problem and let the public make more informed choices when using social media.”
Read the entire interview with the California Magazine here.