European Observatory of Online Hate: Multi-platform Hate Speech Monitoring in 24 Languages

Introduction

As a consortium of 4 partners they were  looking for a way to empower their community of experts to join forces and share expertise on the fundamental nature of the dynamics of online hate. Its beating heart? A standardized framework for more than 20 social media platforms monitored. The project is being brought to life with Textgain in the lead, and in cooperation with Dare To Be Grey, Hogeschool Utrecht and PCDS.

Challenge

The framework infrastructure we are building has to be both efficient and scalable, and should provide first-line practitioners in civil society organizations, law enforcement, and government agencies with additional enhancements over time. 

Our framework has to account for the integration of different data structures. Moreover, the target community features many experts, each with their own needs and expertise, so we need to adapt to those seamlessly.

Solution

In this team-wide effort to build a standardized framework for more than 20 social media platforms, resource sharing and parallelization are key. 

We started off with roundtables across Europe to chart the experts’ needs, to identify which functionalities are most desirable or urgent? We gathered the needs of different types of stakeholders, including academics, NGOs and law enforcement, and translated those into our design and functionalities.

On the technical side we included bug diagnostics tools to identify and adapt solutions during the project’s lifetime.

Result

This is work in progress which you can track at https://eooh.eu/