Information for NGOs and Researchers

OHPI are currently inviting NGOs, community organisations and universities (including departments and research centres) to become supporters of Fight Against Hate – see details.

The biggest challenge for any NGO or researcher looking at online hate is meaningful data collection. Social media is characterised by millions of little bits of content getting published and shared regardless of geography or time. To monitor or capture this data in ways that make it worth analysing further is both time and resource intensive.

As a result, NGOs focus their efforts on campaigning against individual encounters of online hate speech, and academics and researches often seriously limit the focus and scope of their research. This results in an information vacuum where we lack the data to put real numbers on the size of the online hate problem and the different ways it manifests. Such numbers and trends are critical to building an evidence-based approach to countering hate speech and to ensuring existing approaches are effective. This is where Fight Against Hate comes in.

Fight Against Hate is an online hate reporting and monitoring tool. It can be used by anti-hate activists from anywhere in the world to report online hate speech. The software documents the content, and allows users to categorise the type of hate. Through repeated reports and evaluations by other users Fight Against Hate can monitor the time taken by the social media platform to remove the content, or track how long the current content has been online despite user reports.

OHPI’s software is based on crowd-sourcing and designed to scale. The user-generated content on social media is so huge that only a crowd-based reporting tool can help keep track of it. In fact, even social media companies rely on crowd-based reporting systems – where users of the platform report hate content – to monitor it. However, as expected, they closely guard this data.

Fight Against Hate provides an alternative space for people to report, and helps make this data accessible outside of social media companies. NGOs and academics can use the system to get raw data on online hate which they can then study. The tool will help uncover the quantity and nature of online hate, uncover trends and allow experts to build effective strategies, theories and response policies.

There are two ways in which NGOs and researchers can use Fight Against Hate.

• As an easily accessible online tool for the NGO/academic to document online hate. They can use it within their own organisation as an interactive platform for their activists /researchers to store and analyse the raw data they collect.
• As a tool to access the data provided by the crowd, saving themselves time and resources while accessing a richer pool of data.

To find out more, please attend the launch or write to us. For a sneak peek of the tool, go here.
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