Information for Social-Media Users

If you are a social media user, chances are that you have already come across hate speech: #Hitlerwasright or #GamerGate on twitter, Facebook pages that are Anti-Muslim or filled with Aboriginal Memes or Holocaust denial, White supremacist YouTube videos, homophobic comments and jokes across a variety of platforms… the list is endless.

People are constantly bullied, humiliated, harassed or threatened on social media for reasons of their ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation or a variety of other reasons. The experience becomes even more distressing when efforts to get the content removed fail, as they often do.  Social media platforms can appear intransigent and uncooperative. Those facing the abuse often work alone and have no contact with others facing similar problems. In short, those targeted by abuse feel isolated and disempowered. Fight Against Hate is an online tool designed to change this.

Fight Against Hate will empower social media users, allowing users to register reports of online hate with a system that is independent of the social media companies. The content will be able to be reviewed by those opposing online hate, allowing collective actions. Anonymous data about the items of hate entered into the system will also be available to NGOs, academics and government agencies. Fight Against Hate will not only facilitate cooperation against online hate by social media users, it will also add some much needed transparency, which will in turn put pressure on social media companies to do better when it comes to their response to reports of online hate.

Here’s what you can use Fight Against Hate for:

• Report online hate to an independent register of online incidents
• Review the reports made by others, helping to validate them
• Check if action has been taken on items previously reported
• Interact with others in your team to discuss and debate the validity of certain items reported
• Acknowledgement of effort spent combating online hate through impact statistics and badges
• Join in campaigns to highlight content that the community deems inappropriate has which has been up for too long
• Fight Against Hate is currently limited to content from Facebook and YouTube, two of the biggest social media platforms, but additional platforms will be added as the system grows.

Documenting online hate is the first step towards building strategies and policies to fight it. Join the effort to Fight Against Hate to make a difference. Registrations will open with the launch of the tool at a public event on Dec 9, 2010 in Sydney. For details go Back to the event main page.