Sometimes we ask for donations. Today we just need your time.
Five years ago, we helped launch Hatebase, a tool which NGOs like the Sentinel Project use to monitor incidents of hate speech. Hate speech is a quantifiable, well recognized step that can lead to mass atrocities in conflict-torn countries.
We’re proud to say that Hatebase has now captured over half a million datapoints across approximately 200 countries, and attracted attention from a wide range of media outlets including Wired, Maclean’s, and The Toronto Star. Researchers from Harvard, Stanford, and NYU continue to work with Hatebase’s open dataset.
Hatebase’s software does most of this monitoring automatically but we need some human help to make it better. Today we ask you to spend just a few minutes of your time rating the offensiveness of some familiar terms in Hatebase. This is quick and easy to do, and the more terms you rate, the more efficient Hatebase becomes at prioritizing the impact of sightings of hate speech all over the world.
Here’s all you have to do to make a difference:
- Go the Hatebase website at https://hatebase.org. If you have a Hatebase account, log in. If not, you don’t need one.
- You can search for specific terms on the left or just click “surprise me” in the box on the right to reload the home page with a random term from the database.
- When you find a term you recognize, click on it to go to a page about that term.
- On the page is an “offensiveness slider”. Slide it to wherever you personally think it should be and click SAVE. (Don’t forget — you have to click SAVE for your rating to be remembered.)
- That’s it! You’ve successfully rated the offensiveness of a term in Hatebase. If you can do a dozen more, you’ll have gone a long way to improving Hatebase.(Remember, you can always return to the home page and “surprise me” link by clicking the Hatebase logo in the upper left of the screen.)
If you’re having trouble, just follow along in this YouTube video: