Hatebase Tries To Scan For Precursors of Genocide In Language 190
An anonymous reader writes "Hatebase, a new crowdsourced database of multilingual hate speech from The Sentinel Project, is an attempt to create a repository of words and phrases that researchers can use to detect the early stages of genocide."
Mostly false positives, will be used for "hate". (Score:5, Insightful)
My expectation is that this will be used for political infighting, much like the genocide it purports to try to head off.
The "crowd" will include activists for one (or more) sides of contentious political disputes, who will feed the database with typical word choices of their enemies, in the hope of branding them as potential genocide perpetrators. The result will be a produce far more false positives than true ones (if it produces any of the latter at all).
Indeed, the very phrase "hate speech" is such a faction-specific term. It is used by the US left wing to attempt to suppress politically incorrect free speech - especially politicall speech - of those with whom they disagree.
For an example of what I'm talking about, look at the Southern Poverty Law Center's pronouncements - including especially their advice to law enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security that displaying bumper stickers supporting Ron Paul during the presidential primary, or any of a number of other pro-Constitution or Tea Party political position messages, was a sign that the driver was a terrorist.
Good idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Now instead of just laws requiring data retention to prevent child pornography, we can now also use genocide prevention as an excuse. And then of course just use it to go after copyright infringers.
If you want to learn about genocide speech, go to stormfront.org, there's no need to build a new database when somebody has already created one for you.
Thought crime (Score:4, Insightful)
Sweet. We finally reached the point where we're just looking for thought crimes.
Re:Mostly false positives, will be used for "hate" (Score:5, Insightful)
My expectation is that this will be used for political infighting, much like the genocide it purports to try to head off.
I rather think this will be used to weed out political dissent among the population.
Re:Hatebase as in hate speech, as in ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Here is a FTFY (aka fixed-that-for-you) example. I will now conjugate the following:
No, they do not believe in the true concept of FREE speech - their only aim is to force everyone in using political correct speeches
With the FTFY conjugation which takes ownership of all aspects of society by turning all third person plural forms into first person plural forms that quote becomes:
No, we do not believe in the true concept of FREE speech - our only aim is to force everyone in using political correct speeches (sic)
My point is that "they" are not the problem. My point is that "we" are the problem. Every last fallible one of us can be a problem or a solution. The difference is often a matter of how compassionate we are combined with how much we are able to take personal responsibility for problems. Even (maybe especially?) the problems which seem to be caused by other people.
While I may be liberal and you may be conservative, the reality is that our society is comprised of both of us and we are both liberal and conservative. We are all the things we which are. By treating the problem as "our" problem instead of "their" problem we can approach the solution with realism and healing, instead of idealism and revenge.
Of course we could, instead, go on blaming other people, but look where that has gotten us so far . . .
Re:hatebase? (Score:4, Insightful)
"The 8 stages of Genocide" (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately they focus mainly on religious and ethnic hatred, which doesn't really account for some of the biggest genocides of the 20th century like in Pol Pot's Cambodia, Stalin's USSR and Mao's China, They do mention Pol Pot a couple of times, for the "blue ribbon" symbolism and the "Denial" stage, but miss the root of the problem. Their view is shallow at best, IMO.
It is fashionable to focus almost exclusively on race, religion and nationalism, but ironically, the biggest killings in the past century came from ideologies aiming to unite mankind beyond those "hate" barriers.
"Genocide Watch" would have probably missed those "early stages" of Communism...
no data for big data (Score:5, Insightful)
The basis for this appears to be pure speculation. There is no actual data (big or otherwise) showing the validity of the assumptions on which this is based.
New ammunition for political correct do-gooders? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Mostly false positives, will be used for "hate" (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you just proved his point. You are doing exactly that, you are using this as fodder for political infighting. You don't like it so you label it as hate speech. Does that mean we treat it the same way Europe treats it? Somebody makes an anti-Semitic comment on twitter, so France wants to put them in jail?
Anyways, yes they both do it. 10 seconds of google and I found something that tops yours: Obama makes fun of disabled people:
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2009/03/president-ob-15-3/ [go.com]
You're one of those people who I commonly rail against when I say we need to stop treating the election like we're rival football teams. Quite possibly one of the ones I rail against for blind voting.
Re:Mostly false positives, will be used for "hate" (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not in the US, so maybe I'm missing some context here, but...
How on earth are either of the links you've just posted examples of hate speech? The first is a line on the abortion debate that we've seen many times over the years. I'm not going to pick sides in that one; but if you approach the debate (as some people do) with the starting point that foes "life begins at conception" then abortion is infanticide. I think a lot of the lack of civility around that particular debate stems from the fact that neither side recognises just how high the stakes feel for the other side in it.
The second link is a fairly silly take on the gun control debate that somehow slides into an odd reductio ab absurdum take on the gay marriage debate. But again, incoherent though it is, is it really hate speech?
If somebody says "All members of (ethnic group x/social group y) are scum! Let's (kill them/throw them out of our country/deprive them of their property rights)" then that feels like hate speech. That's a hell of a long way from either of the examples you link to.
As a test, let's take an example from a left-wing perspective of somebody linking a (generally supported - the UK public consistently backs a tougher line on welfare in polls) Government policy to murder. In this case, it's the murder of the disabled rather than the infanticide, but I think that's still pretty emotive. So: from the UK's Guardian newspaper [guardian.co.uk]. Is that hate speech?
If you answer "yes", at least you're consistent. If your answer is no, then it looks more like you're just demonstrating totalitarian instincts to suppress speech that goes against your own values.
Re:China-Friendly (Score:3, Insightful)
apparently not searching for Chinese characters
They're not even allowed. In a time when most of the web has switched over to Unicode this is an unbelievable oversight.
From the FAQ [hatebase.org]:
Why doesn't submitted vocabulary retain any accented characters?
Hatebase is a multilingual platform and accepts all UTF-8 characters (including accented characters), but "latinizes" the main vocabulary field to optimize search performance.
If you're adding a term with an accent, simply repeat the term somewhere in the "meaning" field, which isn't latinized.
Why doesn't Hatebase accept non-UTF8 characters?
At present, Hatebase is architected to display UTF-8 characters only -- basically, the extended Latin alphabet, including accented characters. Further extending Hatebase to logographic character sets is certainly on our roadmap, but may not happen anytime soon unless we hear from our users that it's strongly desired.
So according to them Chinese characters cannot be encoded in UTF-8? And entries in non-Latin alphabets are excluded from a multilingual database? These people don't know what they're doing.
Re:Mostly false positives, will be used for "hate" (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah dude. Political scientists don't think like that and tend to be fairly serious minded men. If activists are putting in bogus data, its going to stick out like a sore thumb.
This seems to be more like some of the research google was doing spotting emerging trends via language use.
Go read the stuff about the 8 stage genocide model and specifically on the 'symbolization' phase. I suspect its more about looking for trends like where a population for instance stops saying "jews" and starts saying "kikes" or whatever, whith the observation that a population is heading towards the crucial dehumanization phase needed to allow people to sleep at night whilst committing genocide.
Re:Good idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Correct, genocidal tendencies are not difficult to spot. For one thing a large segment of the population is regularly talking about killing, imprisoning or deporting a smaller segment of the population. Genocide by its nature requires the involvement of lots and lots of people, and they won't be shy about giving you their opinion. For example pre world war 2 Germany was riddled with anti-semitism, that's a hazardous situation. It's not something that appears from a vacuum nor a spontaneous event.
I'd be very wary of this initiative as another effort to water down terms which describe truly horrendous crimes by assigning them to lesser actions, like the incessant use of 'rape' by hardline misandrists.
Re:Good idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually stormfront.org is valuable as a huge negative data point.
The purpose of their project, as I understand it, is to detect when a population is in the early stages of an actual developing genocide situation. Stormfront.org is a sample of the sort of speech that occurs in a group which is grossly failing to to get anywhere. The stormfronters have all sorts of grand fantasies of what they want and believe, but at least on some level they know damn well that they don't have general public support for it. Stormfront.org's rhetoric is filled with an attitude that they are persecuted victims, the feel frustrated and powerless. I expect that is about the last thing you'd find in a genuine developing genocide situation. In a genuine genocide situation the hate speech agitators are not feeling powerless - they are feeling supported and powerful and emboldened... that they can boldly go out there without hiding their intent, without fear or shame, to seize control, to just plain engage in flagrant public violence.
The stormfronters feel like powerless victims. They may sneak around in the dark and commit pointless vandalism like spiteful children, but they are not anywhere in the same universe as a situation where people go out in broad daylight committing mass violence and inviting their police-buddies to come along with their cop-cars and heavy weapon supplies.
-
Re:Hatebase as in hate speech, as in ... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the same as any NLP crowd-sourcing tool; it's simply designed with a focus on correlating vocabulary with prejudicial sentiment. No one is planning to use it to pass restrictive laws. It's just useful for people who are involved in a country, but are not fluent speakers of $foo or involved in the right subcultures, to know that a certain word has now acquired a negative connotation.
Except that it's not going to work. Show me an NLP system that correctly distinguishes statements from quotations and references. You'd need an AI-complete system to divine the actual state of mind of the speaker. Or does the "crowdsourcing" part mean that there are going to be scores of people checking and rechecking flagged texts?
Re:Hatebase as in hate speech, as in ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Man, this has me conflicted. A bunch of crazy Christians fighting with a bunch of crazy Muslims! I can't stand either of them. Did those Christians really have to walk in there and be annoying? And yet, those security guards and their other friends had no right to harass those Christians, annoying as they obviously were.
And holy crap, that tail of security people towards the end was pretty hilarious! Did they have nothing better to do than to gang up on those annoying Christians? How many Muslim security guards does it take to escort a couple of annoying Christians off the property?
Wait... was this public property or private?