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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.
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.
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.
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."
{^_^}
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Watch what happens to Jean Valjean to see where that sort of thinking gets us.
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.