Launching of a center in Silicon Valley to combat cyber-hate

With the upward rise in hate crimes all across the country and online, an outpost is going to be set in the Silicon Valley by the Anti-Defamation League which will be backed by the Omidyar Network which will consider and find out technological ways that may be used to fight back.In the run-up to the recently conducted election the religious and racially motivated threats were inflated and this up rise in the abominable threats has continued into the next year. These events have resulted in the killing of an Indian in Kansas City and a Sikh in the suburbs of Seattle in the last month. Meanwhile more than 1’000 incidents were reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center in the month of January, followed by the presidential elections.

The targeting of Jewish community is also on the rise and 152 bomb threats were reported at synagogues and community centers all over the country.

According to Anti-Defamation League internet is the main cause that is triggering the hate speech in the current times. For this specific reason ADL is going to marshal its resources through Silicon Valley in creating and implementing useful tools to track, analyze, monitor and mitigate harassment and hate speech across the cyber world.

Facebook at the moment is used by 1.8 billion users and over 500 million tweets are seen everyday.

“Currently Facebook is used by 1.8 billion people—and more than 500 million tweets are seen every 24 hours. No matter how one looks at these stats but we are taking this brawl to the zone where the entire country and world is, i.e. the online world.

Although ADL has been well settled in San Francisco, but the new command centre in Silicon Valley will serve the purpose of combating all kinds of cyber threats.

The group is not only looking to monitor and report the hate speech but is also planning to oversee the online presence of a number of minority organizations as well as it is preparing to partner with the leading technology organizations to make sure the inline communities are safe and secure.

The group has already started its venture with Alphabet and its Jigsaw division to improve the already developed software whose purpose is to filter and identify hate speech and propaganda.

According to Greenblatt the ADL group has been tracking online hate speech since the beginning of Internet. Now that the importance of internet has increased immensely in the people’s life, the need of tracking it has become greater then it was before.

Managed by Brittan Heller, former Department of Justice lawyer the newly setup centre is going to develop reports and publish cyberbullying and cyberhate data. Not only it will engage the partners, it will assist in providing insight to the policy makers. More so it is going to combat harassment cases online.

“Islamophobia, racism, anti-semitism and other hatreds have really detonated on the internet - the bringing, implementing of best in class technology to counter it is extremely important and beneficial. This is the reason we set up a control centre in Silicon Valley and we will always be thankful to Omidyar Network for their efforts and providing us with seed funding”.

This is an extension of those efforts which the ADL has been doing for long against the cyber hate and its newly built presence in the Valley will let it thrive and team up with the tech industry against the ongoing threats.