We Counter Hate
One of the most fascinating examples of social innovation Ive been tracking recently was the We Counter Hate platform, by Seattle-based agency Wunderman Thompson Seattle (formerly POSSIBLE) that sought to reduce hate speech on Twitter by turning retweets of these hateful messages into donations for a good cause.
Heres how it worked: Using machine learning, it first identified hateful speech on the platform. A human moderator then selected the most offensive and most dangerous tweets and attached an undeletable reply, which informed recipients that if they retweet the message, a donation will be committed to an anti-hate group. In a beautiful twist this non-profit wasLife After Hate, a group that helps members of extremist groups leave and transition to mainstream life.
Unfortunately (and ironically) on the very day I reached out to the team, Twitter decided to allow users to hide replies in their feeds in an effort to empower people faced with bullying and harassment, eliminating the reply function which was the main mechanism that gave #WeCounterHate its power and led to it being able to remove more than 20M potentialhatespeech impressions.
Undeterred, I caught up with some members of the core teamShawn Herron, Jason Carmel and Matt Gilmoreto find out more about their journey.
(From left to right)Shawn Herron, Experience Technology Director @ Wunderman ThompsonMatt ... [+] Gilmore, Creative Director @ Wunderman ThompsonJason Carmel, Chief Data Officer @ Wunderman Thompson
Afdhel Aziz: Gentlemen, welcome. How did the idea for WeCounterHate come about?
Shawn Herron: It started when we caught wind of what the citizens of the town of Wunsiedel, Germany were doing to combat the annual extremists that were descending on their town every year to hold rally and march through the streets. The towns people had devised a peaceful way to upend the extremists efforts by turning their hateful march into an involuntary walk-a-thon that benefitted EXIT Deutschland, an organization that helps people escape extremist groups. For every meter the neo Nazis marched 10 euro would be donated to Exit Deutschland. The question became, how can we scale something like that so anyone, anywhere, could have the ability to fight against hate in a meaningful way?
Jason Carmel: We knew that, to create scale, it had to be digital in nature and Twitter seemed like the perfect problem in need of a solution. We figured if we could reduce hate on a platform of that magnitude, even a small percentage, it could have a big impact. We started by developing an innovative machine-learning and natural-language processing technology that could identify and classify hate speech.
Matt Gilmore: But we still needed the mechanic, a catch 22, that would present those looking to spread hate on the platform with a no-win decision to make. Thats when we stumbled onto the fact that Twitter didnt allow people to delete comments on their tweets. The only way to remove a comment was to delete the post entirely. That mechanic is what gave us a way put a permanent marker, in the form of an image and message, on tweets containing hate speech. Its that permanent marker that let those looking to retweet, and spread hate, know that doing so would benefit an organization theyre opposed to, Life After Hate. No matter what they chose to do, love wins.
Aziz: Fascinating. So, what led you to the partnership with Life After Hate and how did that work?
Carmel: Staffed and founded by former hate group members and violent extremists, Life After Hate is a non-profit that helps people in extremist groups break from that hate-filled lifestyle. They offer a welcoming way out thats free of judgement.We collaborated with them in training the AI thats used to identify hate speech in near real time on Twitter. With the benefit of their knowledge our AI can even find hidden forms of hate speech (coded language, secret emoji combinations) in a vast sea of tweets. Their expertise was crucial to align the language we used when countering hate, making it more compassionate and matter-of-fact, rather than confrontational.
Herron: Additionally, their partnership just made perfect sense on a conceptual level as the beneficiary of the effort. If youre one of those people looking to spread hate on Twitter, youre much less likely to hit retweet knowing that youll be benefiting an organization youre opposed to.
Aziz: Was it hard to wade through that much hate speech? What surprised you?
Herron: Being exposed to all the hate filled tweets was easily the most difficult part of the whole thing. The human brain is not wired to read and see the kinds of messages we encountered for long periods of time. At the end of the countering process, after the AI identified hate, we always relied on a human moderator to validate it before countering/tagging it. We broke up the shifts between many volunteers, but it was always quite difficult when it was your shift.
Carmel: We learned that the identification of hate speech was much easier than categorizing it. Or initial understanding of hate speech, especially before Life After Hate helped us, was really just the movie version of hate speech and missed a lot of hidden context. We were also surprised at how much the language would evolve relative to current events. It was definitely something we had to stay on top of.
We were surprised by how broad a spectrum of people the hate was coming from. We went in thinking wed just encounter a bunch of thugs, but many of these people held themselves out as academics, comedians, or historians. The brands of hate some of them shared were nuanced and, in an insidious way, very compelling.
We were caught off guard by the amount of time and effort those who disliked our platform would take to slam or discredit it. A lot of these people are quite savvy and would go to great lengths to attempt to undermine our efforts. Outside of the things we dealt with in Twitter, one YouTube hate-fluencer made a video, close to an hour long, that wove all sorts of intricate theories and conspiracies about our platform.
Gilmore: We were also surprised by how wrong our instincts were. When we first started, the things we were seeing made us angry and frustrated. We wanted to come after these hateful people in an aggressive way. We wanted to fight back. Life After Hate was essential in helping course-correct our tone and message. They helped us understand (and wed like more people to know) the power of empathy combined with education, and its ability to remove walls rather than build them between people. It can be difficult to take this approach, but it ultimately gets everyone to a better place.
Aziz: I love that idea empathy with education. What were the results of the work youve done so far? How did you measure success?
Carmel: The WeCounterHate platform radically outperformed expectations of identifying hate speech (91% success) relative to a human moderator, as we continued to improve the model over the course of the project.
When @WeCounterHatereplied to a tweet containing hate, it reduces the spread of that hate by an average of 54%. Furthermore, 19% of the "hatefluencers" deleted their original tweet outright once it had been countered.
By our estimates, the Hate Tweets we countered were shared roughly 20 million fewer times compared to similar Hate Tweets by the same authors that werent countered.
Matt: It was a pretty mind-bending exercise for people working in an ad agency, that have spent our entire careers trying to gain exposure for the work we do on behalf of clients, to suddenly be trying to reduce impressions. We even began referring to WCH as the worlds first reverse-media plan, designed to reduce impressions by stopping retweets.
Aziz: So now that the project has ended, how do you hope to take this idea forward in an open source way?
Herron: Our hope was to counter hate speech online, while collecting insightful data about how hate speech online propagates. Going forward, hopefully this data will allow experts in the field to address the hate speech problem at a more systemic level. Our goal is to publicly open source archived data that has been gathered, hopefully next quarter (Q1 2020)
I love this idea on so many different levels. The ingenuity of finding a way to counteract hate speech without resorting to censorship. The partnership with Life After Hate to improve the sophistication of the detection. And the potential for this same model to be applied to so many different problems in the world (*anyone want to build a version for climate change deniers?). It proves that the creativity of the advertising world can truly be turned into a force for good, and for that I salute the team for showing us this powerful act of moral imagination.
Go here to see the original:
- Classic reasoning systems like Loom and PowerLoom vs. more modern systems based on probalistic networks [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Using Amazon's cloud service for computationally expensive calculations [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Software environments for working on AI projects [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- New version of my NLP toolkit [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Semantic Web: through the back door with HTML and CSS [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Java FastTag part of speech tagger is now released under the LGPL [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Defining AI and Knowledge Engineering [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Great Overview of Knowledge Representation [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Something like Google page rank for semantic web URIs [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- My experiences writing AI software for vehicle control in games and virtual reality systems [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- The URL for this blog has changed [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- I have a new page on Knowledge Management [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- N-GRAM analysis using Ruby [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Good video: Knowledge Representation and the Semantic Web [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Using the PowerLoom reasoning system with JRuby [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Machines Like Us [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- RapidMiner machine learning, data mining, and visualization tool [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- texai.org [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- NLTK: The Natural Language Toolkit [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- My OpenCalais Ruby client library [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Ruby API for accessing Freebase/Metaweb structured data [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Protégé OWL Ontology Editor [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- New version of Numenta software is available [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Very nice: Elsevier IJCAI AI Journal articles now available for free as PDFs [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Verison 2.0 of OpenCyc is available [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- What’s Your Biggest Question about Artificial Intelligence? [Article] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Minimax Search [Knowledge] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Decision Tree [Knowledge] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- More AI Content & Format Preference Poll [Article] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- New Planners Solve Rescue Missions [News] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Neural Network Learns to Bluff at Poker [News] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Pushing the Limits of Game AI Technology [News] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Mining Data for the Netflix Prize [News] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Interview with Peter Denning on the Principles of Computing [News] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Decision Making for Medical Support [News] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Neural Network Creates Music CD [News] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- jKilavuz - a guide in the polygon soup [News] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial General Intelligence: Now Is the Time [News] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Apply AI 2007 Roundtable Report [News] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- What Would You do With 80 Cores? [News] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Software Finds Learning Language Child's Play [News] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial Intelligence in Games [Article] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial Intelligence Resources [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Alan Turing: Mathematical Biologist? [Last Updated On: April 25th, 2012] [Originally Added On: April 25th, 2012]
- BBC Horizon: The Hunt for AI ( Artificial Intelligence ) - Video [Last Updated On: April 30th, 2012] [Originally Added On: April 30th, 2012]
- Can computers have true artificial intelligence" Masonic handshake" 3rd-April-2012 - Video [Last Updated On: April 30th, 2012] [Originally Added On: April 30th, 2012]
- Kevin B. Korb - Interview - Artificial Intelligence and the Singularity p3 - Video [Last Updated On: April 30th, 2012] [Originally Added On: April 30th, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence - 6 Month Anniversary - Video [Last Updated On: April 30th, 2012] [Originally Added On: April 30th, 2012]
- Science Breakthroughs [Last Updated On: April 30th, 2012] [Originally Added On: April 30th, 2012]
- Hitman: Blood Money - Part 49 - Stupid Artificial Intelligence! - Video [Last Updated On: April 30th, 2012] [Originally Added On: April 30th, 2012]
- Research Members Turned Off By HAARP Artificial Intelligence - Video [Last Updated On: April 30th, 2012] [Originally Added On: April 30th, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence Lecture No. 5 - Video [Last Updated On: April 30th, 2012] [Originally Added On: April 30th, 2012]
- The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 2012 - Video [Last Updated On: April 30th, 2012] [Originally Added On: April 30th, 2012]
- Charlie Rose - Artificial Intelligence - Video [Last Updated On: April 30th, 2012] [Originally Added On: April 30th, 2012]
- Expert on artificial intelligence to speak at EPIIC Nights dinner [Last Updated On: May 4th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 4th, 2012]
- Filipino software engineers complete and best thousands on Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Course [Last Updated On: May 4th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 4th, 2012]
- Vodafone xone™ Hackathon Challenges Developers and Entrepreneurs to Build a New Generation of Artificial Intelligence ... [Last Updated On: May 4th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 4th, 2012]
- Rocket Fuel Packages Up CPG Booster [Last Updated On: May 4th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 4th, 2012]
- 2 Filipinos finishes among top in Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence course [Last Updated On: May 5th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 5th, 2012]
- Why Your Brain Isn't A Computer [Last Updated On: May 5th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 5th, 2012]
- 2 Pinoy software engineers complete Stanford's AI course [Last Updated On: May 7th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 7th, 2012]
- Percipio Media, LLC Proudly Accepts Partnership With MIT's Prestigious Computer Science And Artificial Intelligence ... [Last Updated On: May 10th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 10th, 2012]
- Google Driverless Car Ok'd by Nevada [Last Updated On: May 10th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 10th, 2012]
- Moving Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Rocket Fuel and Forrester Research Announce Free Webinar [Last Updated On: May 10th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 10th, 2012]
- Rocket Fuel Wins 2012 San Francisco Business Times Tech & Innovation Award [Last Updated On: May 13th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 13th, 2012]
- Internet Week 2012: Rocket Fuel to Speak at OMMA RTB [Last Updated On: May 16th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 16th, 2012]
- How to Get the Most Out of Your Facebook Ads -- Rocket Fuel's VP of Products, Eshwar Belani, to Lead MarketingProfs ... [Last Updated On: May 16th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 16th, 2012]
- The Digital Disruptor To Banking Has Just Gone International [Last Updated On: May 16th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 16th, 2012]
- Moving Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Rocket Fuel Announce Free Webinar Featuring an Independent Research Firm [Last Updated On: May 23rd, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 23rd, 2012]
- MASA Showcases Latest Version of MASA SWORD for Homeland Security Markets [Last Updated On: May 23rd, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 23rd, 2012]
- Bluesky Launches Drones for Aerial Surveying [Last Updated On: May 23rd, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 23rd, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence: What happened to the hunt for thinking machines? [Last Updated On: May 25th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 25th, 2012]
- Bubble Robots Move Using Lasers [VIDEO] [Last Updated On: May 25th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 25th, 2012]
- UHV assistant professors receive $10,000 summer research grants [Last Updated On: May 27th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 27th, 2012]
- Artificial intelligence: science fiction or simply science? [Last Updated On: May 28th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 28th, 2012]
- Exetel taps artificial intelligence [Last Updated On: May 29th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 29th, 2012]
- Software offers brain on the rain [Last Updated On: May 29th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 29th, 2012]
- New Dean of Science has high hopes for his faculty [Last Updated On: May 30th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 30th, 2012]
- Cognitive Code Announces "Silvia For Android" App [Last Updated On: May 31st, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 31st, 2012]
- A Rat is Smarter Than Google [Last Updated On: June 5th, 2012] [Originally Added On: June 5th, 2012]