I have an interesting software project in collaboration with a researcher at U Penn on combatting online hate speech. We are looking for a software developer to help us build some software. It’s an experimental academic project, so our funds are very tight. It’s effectively a volunteer project, but one that could have a very positive impact.
If you’re looking to volunteer somewhere, maybe you’ll consider this project. Email me at iwoj@alum.mit.edu to learn more.
Sure, basically we are looking to three components: a scraping system that ingests messages from a number of online forums that tend to foster hate speech; a system that evaluates and measures hate speech levels in those messages using both automated and human evaluations; and a system that stores these changing levels of hate speech over time. We are planning to post messages in these forums that we think may reduce hate speech levels. The system will help us detect what, if any, effect we have.
It’s not technically complex work, but it will take some hours to build. The automated evaluation methods already exist, but need to be implemented following existing published literature.