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

Re:Nonsense.

[Ol Olsoc]

Google has spoken and answer to your question is yes. We are going down this path. As before there were voices for reason and moderation and they were either ignored or people daring have contrary opinions were charged with the same thought crime as the others. I

Wow, I had no idea that a directory of actual criminals was the equivalent of the holocaust. We need to eliminate the Sex offender registry, and all criminal records because, well, you know where the hate crime database would come from, and since this is a terribly slippery slope, we have to eliminate the source of this totalitarianist power grab.

Oh, I forgot to add the base of all this is the High School permanent record. I've been haunted by my putting a Turkey foot in Linda Smith's desk in 5th grade my entire life. Is there no end to this punishment?

More to the serious level, this is something that you or I could prepare. I find it impossible to believe that such a database does not already exist, and could easily be prepared from criminal records. This is Slashdot trolling for outrage clicks. Looks like it is working, getting clicks for outrage, and clicks for me knowing there will be plenty of people to ridicule.