Mx Newspaper, 9 December 2014, Hitting back against hate

Web users are being armed with a new weapon in the war against online hate.

Melbourne-based charity The Online Hate Prevention Institute will launch a tool tonight at ohpi.org.au that can be used to report, log and track online hate.

Fight Against Hate uses crowd-sourcing to wage war on the haters by allowing users globally to alert experts to online hate in real time.

It will be wielded against those who espouse forms of hate including anti-semitism, cyber-bullying, Islamophobia, misogyny and racism.

Those who encounter hateful content are being urged to log it using the simple tool after first reporting it to the platform where it’s been posted.

OHPI chief executive Andre Oboler said users could see what had been reported and the response from the relevant platform.

“They also work in teams so they can see a list of everything members of their team have reported,” he said.

“That enables them to then go and again report to the platforms and to our system those items that their team members have identified as problems that need attention.”

Oboler said the tool would add “a lot of transparency to the way social media companies deal with reports of online hate”.

“At the moment everyone knows what they’ve reported but they don’t know how many (other) reports have been made,” he said.

mX contacted Facebook, Google, which owns YouTube, and Twitter for comment but none was forthcoming before deadline.

Fight Against Hate will be launched today from 6pm at B’nai B’rith Centre, 22 Yurong St, East Sydney.

See https://ohpi.org.au/fah-launch-event-sydney-2014/.