Google and ProPublica Team Up To Build a National Hate Crime Database (techcrunch.com)

In partnership with ProPublica, Google News Lab is launching a new tool to track hate crimes across America. The "Documenting Hate News Index" is being powered by machine learning to track reported hate crimes across all 50 states, collecting data from February 2017 onward. TechCrunch reports: Data visualization studio Pitch Interactive helped craft the index, which collects Google News results and filters them through Google's natural language analysis to extract geographic and contextual information. Because they are not catalogued in any kind of formal national database, a fact that inspired the creation of the index to begin with, Google calls the project a "starting point" for the documentation and study of hate crimes. While the FBI is legally required to document hate crimes at the federal level, state and local authorities often fail to report their own incidents, making the data incomplete at best.

The initiative is a data-rich new arm of the Documenting Hate project which collects and verifies hate incidents reported by both individual contributors and by news organizations. The Hate News Index will keep an eye out for false positives (casual uses of the word "hate" for example), striking a responsible balance between machine learning and human curation on a very sensitive subject. Hate events will be mapped onto a calendar in the user interface, though users can also use a keyword search or browse through algorithmic suggestions. For anyone who'd like to take the data in a new direction, Google will open sourced its data set, making it available through GitHub.

Comments

Nonsense.

[skam240]

Trolling? What the hell are you talking about? I'm all for freedom of speech but as a society committed to freedom and openness we do need to keep an eye on our least desirable elements.

Re:What's the point?

[AHuxley]

Re "We've moving to the next stage of thought crimes"
Start moving the Overton window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Precrime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Then thoughtcrime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

Re:Who appointed them arbiters of free speech

[cryptizard]

This is what happened early on during the Wiemar Republic as Hitler's Brown Shirts stated govern the public discourse with violence and coercion.

Just clarifying here, you are using nazi atrocities to justify why we should now be tolerant of nazis?

This is a heavy read. It is a scary read. It reveals how "movements" such as Antifa are doing exactly what the Germans did leading up to the collapse of the Wiemar Republic and WW-II.

If you are so familiar with the rise of the nazi party why are you not freaking out at what is happening right now in the US? If we say, "oh they are a small group of crazy people, just ignore them and they will go away," that is exactly what happened in Germany before the nazis managed to pit everyone against each other and wrest control of the government. What do you think we should do to prevent that from happening here? Because allowing them a platform didn't work very well last time.

Re:Yay for censorship technology

[Barsteward]

That depends what those hardcore religious people are doing. if they are spreading hate, threatening people, generally being a catalyst for violence etc, then the comment is fine. but if they are within their own community keeping to themselves and not bothering anyone, i doubt anyone would have a problem with them.