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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.
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.
Wonder how they train this pseudo-AI to recognize what hate crime is. Humans can't really reliably do it, it's always a judgment call very much biased by the individual person's view, especially political views.
And when this AI then can reliably reproduce the views of the one paying for it, Google, then it's awesome to filter pretty much the whole internet the way they want.
The future is a brave new world and I'm very happy to be a part of it!
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.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
What rational, mature people need to do is to start filing reports of all of the SJW bullies and the hate crimes that they commit on a daily basis.
Is this really the type of posters you want to attract Slashdot? This site is going to hell in a handbasket!!
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I hate it already.
Soon enough you will not be allowed to say anything slightly out of line without some algorithm flagging you as a "bad guy".
Luckily I'm old enough that I won't be around to see how this pans out.
Blasphemy? Cartoons and animations about faith need to be tracked too?
Ag-gag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ?
Governments who don't like dissidents?
Authors?
Negative movie reviews?
Books?
Statues?
History?
Tiananmen square?
Whistleblowers?
Whats next for tracking and sorting for contextual information?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
We already HAVE crime statistics reported by the police and the FBI as they document crime.
This is just a VOLUNTARY database (which I'm sure won't be abused) to build up a list of crimes, many of which aren't even legally defined as a crime and charges that were never investigated or go to trial but people's names will be tracked in the database anyway.
We've moving to the next stage of thought crimes where you will be ostracized and penalized because you said she instead of xhe (which is now a punishable crime in California) or because you state anything that's not in step with the gestapo of politically correct thought.
This is not a good thing, these are not enlightened times. We have abandoned objective truth and free speech for a political, nearly religious ideology.
Dark times for the world.
How does a story about Google and databases not belong here?
This is a dangerous idea. Some group, not answerable to anyone, gets to put people into a database of "wrongthink". TFS and TFA talk about "hate crimes" - one would like that to imply that they would only collect law enforcement data, ideally restricted to actual convictions. That might be ok, but that's not what they're doing.
In fact, the "hate crime" collection apparently involves becoming a central repository for any sort of article, blog post, or whatever that talks about supposed incidents of "hate". That would be bad enough, since the criteria are entirely subjective.
But it's worse than that. If you go to the actual project page, they want to document hate crimes and "bias incidents". For the latter, they are happy to accept individual stories. Who gets to define what constitutes a "bias" incident?
At best, this is just another SJW right-think project, giving the long list of corporate sponsors a wonderful opportunity to virtue signal. At worst, if individual people are named in the individual stories they intend to collect, it will become a form of arbitrary, non-judicial punishment with no recourse to the people named.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Anyone who can fund a good legal team to define what a crime is.
Hate reading a negative review of a movie expected to make money? A negative movie review could be a crime.
Blasphemy? Thats a real crime in a few nations. To protect trade and investment comments on faith is a crime.
Fraternities and the security services hate seeing their once hidden documents been made public. Publication is a crime.
Hate reading about history and facts? Talking about history becomes liable.
Hate been censored? A nation finds comments or publication about censorship criminal.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Conveniently using their new (and old) Android releases to use the microphone/camera to listen for hateful sounds and record the video. It's all part of your user agreement. Apple doesn't need the functions added since they've been baked in since the beginning. You will align your thoughts to your corporate masters, and when they say Upgrade! you will pay.
Hate crimes and bias incidents are a national problem, but there’s no reliable data on the nature or prevalence of the violence. We’re collecting and verifying reports to create a national database for use by journalists, researchers and civil-rights organizations.
The 2016 election left many in America afraid – of intolerance and the violence it can inspire. The need for trustworthy facts on the details and frequency of hate crimes and other incidents born of prejudice has never been more urgent.
At this point, there is simply no reliable national data on hate crimes. And no government agency documents lower-level incidents of harassment and intimidation, such as online or real-life bullying. Documenting and understanding all of these incidents – from hate-inspired murders to anti-Semitic graffiti to racist online trolling – requires new, more creative approaches.
"hate crime" has a specific messing: crime motivated by hatred a protected class.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I mean, aren't all crimes motivated by hatred?
Nope, a lot of crimes are motivated by material gain. Sociopaths don't hate their victims, they just don't regard costs (emotional, physical, or material) to their victims as important.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
LOVE our new overlords!
They appear to be self appointed arbiters of freedom of speech. This is what happened early on during the Wiemar Republic as Hitler's Brown Shirts stated govern the public discourse with violence and coercion.
More recently in the US I remember the censorship of pornography. The standard was, "I'll recognize it when I see it." It took us a long time to get rid of that censorship. And now we have Google and Pro Publica starting to do the same thing themselves in the name of hate speech, which they refuse to define. "I'll recognize it when I see it." The basic problem is the designated hate speech can be and often is carefully documented taken from primary sources available to everybody. We have somebody going around collecting information, documenting it, and presenting it accurately being censored because the resulting document somehow is this undefined thing called "hate speech."
This action of censorship is purely a symptom of their participating in what they claim they are trying to stop, Fascism in all its odious putrid excrescence.. You can see this if you read William Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." 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.
Please, Google, go back to your roots, "Do no wrong."
{^_^}
I seem to remember other political parties that had a list of people... they were not very nice
A long time ago governments (of all varieties) would keep huge amounts of paper records on anyone or anything they thought was suspicious.
And they could afford to pay people to generate LOTS of records, so there ended up being so many records on paper that they became difficult to use.
Much of the information retained turned out to be ultimately worthless. And of what little of it would have been valuable, there was no way to search or access it efficiently, so it often turned out to be worthless as well.
When computers came along, it was said that they would fix that problem...... And for a while the computers did... But maybe even that tide is now turning?
What this basically amounts to is a special project to discover and sub-index results that are already in Google's database system, but that cannot be searched or accessed conveniently by the normal means.
?
So what is the next stage in search engine design?
Is it to selectively forget results that people click on the least? (not just push them down in the results, but remove them entirely?)
Do a search engine's indexes regularly need to be pruned to improve results?
You're a bit mad, aren't you? But that's OK, there are plenty of crazies here.
No person or corporation can unilaterally decide who is committing a crime and punish the corresponding authors (being in such a database might become an important punishment). In any civilised society, the process should consist in: reasonable evidence of a behaviour against the (ideally fair) law; (ideally fair) trial; and condemn also stating the level of publicity of the corresponding crime/punishment. Not even government-related bodies (e.g., police or public organisations) can avoid that proceeding without facing consequences. Just the fact of even considering the option of allowing private, egoist/pro-profit interests to be in such a judge-jury-executioner position is completely unacceptable. They shouldn't even have proposed such a thing and the corresponding legal bodies shouldn't allow ideas on these lines to ever become a reality.
Clarification for anyone interested: I don't consider myself a potential victim of this kind of things. I am a hate-free person with virtually no prejudices of any kind. Sometimes, I can have a quite aggressive attitude, but always as a reaction to a previous attack and by focusing on the given personality (e.g., "you are an idiot") rather than on generic features like ethnicity, gender, religion, etc. In summary, this post isn't precisely meant to protect myself, but to contribute towards avoiding the ridiculous nonsense of granting more unfair power to doing-everything-for-their-own-growth corporations.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
"Protected class" does NOT have a "specific meaning" as you claim.
The definition includes "race", "gender", and so on, not "black", "woman", and so on.
What you think it means is clearly the later, but you have clearly shown time and again that you arent very good as a thinker, let alone as a good fact checker (such as just now)
White men are a protected class in at least 2 ways that make a class protected, which are race and gender. Not sounding like a "specific meaning" any more, does it? Yeah.. because you are full of shit.
"His name was James Damore."
So what happens when a crime is motivated by a hatred of an unprotected class? Not a hate crime, just an ordinary crime?
I'm willing in principal to buy into the idea of a hate crime as a crime motivated by bias against some kind of identifiable group, but I have to balk at the "protected class" distinction because it seems to rather arbitrarily consider crimes motivated against "unprotected" classes as less serious.
I also question how you determine this bias motivation. Is it strictly limited to the circumstances of the crime committed, or does it involve the perpetrators speech or beliefs outside of the crime's commission? I think both methods are flawed.
As a thought exercise, imagine a person with a public affiliation with some hate group. They get into a fender bender in a parking lot with a member of someone that falls under the umbrella of a disliked group, a fight ensues and they beat that person up. At no time do they mention this person's group status in any way. Under a strict circumstance interpretation, it's not a hate crime because the crime itself isn't liked to an act of bias. But it could easily be the hate group's modus operandi -- fight the disliked group, but keep your mouth shut.
Now imagine a person with a private set of biases. They only express them in one-one interactions with close friends, they don't belong to any hate group. They get involved in a fight with a member of the group they dislike without showing a bias. and after some investigation (seized cell phone, etc) their private biases become known. Is this a hate crime? I'd worry here that any crime involving a so-called protected class would wind up as a fishing expedition to try to discover hidden biases.
Do you know it when you hear, read it...say it? I'm willing to bet one person's opinion is another person's hate speech. It's sad to see that we don't tolerate free speech anymore...what happens when people feel their speech is being restricted? They start to go beyond speech...and into action. The way to keep civility is by allowing free speech, not by limiting it, this is what the founding fathers knew.
Non-specific definitions are not allowed within specific meanings.
When a "specific meaning" has a non-specific definition, it is merely a hand waving assertion that a specific meaning exists.
You can wave your hands all day long about this, but you will still be dead wrong. This "dont look at the flaws of my argument" mentality that you have is very stupid and dumb. its kind of sad, really.
"His name was James Damore."
I'm about as left leaning as left leaning one can be, but this continous trolling by the editors really needs to stop. Please stop it now.
Just so our slahdotter bretheren understand who they are supporting - Chris Cantrell, https://www.washingtonpost.com...
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Very dangerous waters.
This is just an extension of not hiring people that post dumb things on Facebook - except it attacks freedom of speech and assembly and questioning authority - now corporate authority or the authority of another group or country.
Who is to say that just visiting a website where "bias" is discussion does not put you on "a List."
Talk to people from Mao's Cultural Revolution and STASI East Germany.
They will tell you first hand this will all end in tears.
The problem I have with the data sources that may then be used by organizations like Google is that they inherently become subjective as all hell.
For example, if we were to use the definition of a "hate crime" as one where a group or organization engages in violent actions in order to create social change, you not only scoop up White Separatists, but you also scoop up many in the Civil Rights movement, who used violence to get change. You also scoop up the labor rights activists of the early 1900's who engaged in violence in order to promote social change.
So inherently the definition of a "hate crime" becomes inherently tied up in who is doing the hating and what is being hated.
A Westboro Church member punches a homosexual because of who he is, and of course it's a "hate crime." But a homosexual punches a Westboro Church member because of who he is--well, the fact pattern is exactly the same: A punches B because of who B is. But should that be classified as a hate crime?
It's why I'd like to see us do away with the whole concept of "hate crimes" and prosecute the underlying crime instead. And if you want social change badly enough you are willing to sacrifice your life (and become a prisoner for your actions) then so be it. The public can then judge if you're a martyr or a murderer based on the social currents rather than by overt definition.
Or Twitter? After all, they aid and abet this shit in the first place, and their behavior shows it. Aiding and abetting a hate crime is part of hate crimes, IIRC.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"Protected class" does NOT have a "specific meaning" as you claim.
Yes it does!
The definition includes "race", "gender", and so on, not "black", "woman", and so on.
There you go, that's the specific meaning.
If you murder someone because of his or her race or gender it's a hate crime. If you murder someone to steal their wallet it is not.
Not very hard to understand.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
So what happens when a crime is motivated by a hatred of an unprotected class? Not a hate crime, just an ordinary crime?
Yes.
"Hate crime" is just the name of a type of crime that society has judged to be slightly more bad because of the motivation behind it. Like premeditated murder is worse than killing someone in a fit of rage with no prior intent to do so, in the eyes of the law.
Don't try to read anything into the name.
I have to balk at the "protected class" distinction because it seems to rather arbitrarily consider crimes motivated against "unprotected" classes as less serious.
The reason for it is that certain attributes, things like gender and race, are things people have no choice over. Political views are a choice, which football team you support is a choice, being born with a particular colour skin is not. Society considers choices to be fair targets of criticism and even hatred (although of course within the bounds of the law), but bias against things which people have no choice over to be morally repugnant.
I also question how you determine this bias motivation. Is it strictly limited to the circumstances of the crime committed, or does it involve the perpetrators speech or beliefs outside of the crime's commission?
It can indeed be difficult. Well written laws tend to err on the side of caution, requiring the usual standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt" to be met when determining if something is a hate crime.
They get involved in a fight with a member of the group they dislike without showing a bias. and after some investigation (seized cell phone, etc) their private biases become known. Is this a hate crime?
If it is a hate crime or not depends on their motivation, which only they can know for sure unless they happened to communicate to someone that they felt violence towards this group was acceptable and there were no other plausible explanations for why they got into this fight. It would likely be quite hard to prove.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Did they include the Facebook Live Torture case as a hate crime?
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/10/...
Black on white crime is hateful too.
THIS SHIT.
surely, "hate news database" is much less menacing and Orwellian than "hate crime database"
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I hate everybody. Equally. If everyone knows I'm a hater, maybe they'll stay away.
it will be a hate crime not to use google
This isn't government. You tech assholes are just shit at life.
Watch what happens to Jean Valjean to see where that sort of thinking gets us.
Old tech. They are both how old now?
ProPublica is not "Journalism in the Public Interest." It is a leftist propaganda outlet funded by the Sandlers who became wealthy from their subprime mortgage scam. You can see them portrayed by SNL in this video. https://archive.org/details/Pu... That Google should be involved with them means I will be using a different search engine.
Don't you think that the concept of "thought crime" is already bad enough?
Ben Shapiro got physically assaulted and menaced of being beaten up by a transgender on TV and got away with it because as a trans the guy was a protected minority. Look it up if you don't believe me.
Hate Crime.
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
Whenever collecting data and visualizing it in various reports, there usually is an intended purpose, i.e. who's going to be looking at the reports and what actions and/or decisions will be made based on those reports. Those actions/decisions should in turn change the next iteration of the report, closing the control loop.
Can I someone enlighten me what exactly is this hate reporting expected to accomplish? Who is the intended audience and what decisions are they expected to make based on this report?
You will be hearing from Us.
I am looking forward to it. I am always happy to prove bully-wannabes how ridiculous and useless are their petty attempts at trying to impose their arbitrary nonsense on others.
Just in case it isn't evident to everyone: that AC is clearly joking, but I am not.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
As long as -all- hate crimes are put up, with none being dis-included because some believe it's impossible to commit a hate crime against them, then I'm for this.
Frankly, I'd prefer they create a database of crimes by cops.
Or rather -- since cops rarely get prosecuted, much less convicted, for actions that would be considered crimes if committed by non-"heroes" -- a database of, um, dubious actions by cops. Killing pet dogs for no apparently reason. Forcibly exploring bodily orifices under questionable circumstances. Busting into homes without warrants -- for that address. That sort of thing.
Not going to hold my breath, waiting on that one.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
So put me on the list.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The Democratic party. What other group has attracted hate groups of all kinds like they have? Gays that hate non gays, blacks that hate whites, illegals that hate law abiding citizens, and so on and so forth. Overall, they hate America and they'll tell you that. Often openly.
What rational, mature people need to do is to start filing reports of all of the SJW bullies and the hate crimes that they commit on a daily basis.
Ohh look, it's a whining Social Justice for Nazis Warrior.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.