IIIT Delhi Students Launch An Innovative Project Tackling Online Hate Speech

With a rising need to tackle hate speech in the country, particularly on social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter, students from IIIT (Indraprastha Institute of Technology), Delhi have devised a unique project that could effectively help stymie cybercrime.

Named Project Robinhood, the date-driven project will track content on Twitter regarding the upcoming Indian Assembly Elections in 2022 from January to March. The team started by tracking the content posted by 50 politicians; their campaigns, critiques of the opposition, and the response that this content receives from their followers.

From the data collected so far, the team has established that Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, and Uttarakhand produce the highest load of hateful content. Amongst other observations made by the team, hate content is often directed at individual politicians and initiated by political parties. The project uses linguistic patterns and expressions to arrive at its observations.

At a time when hate speech online has adverse real-world consequences, Project Robinhood could be an effective tool to help us understand and analyse emerging patterns of online hate crime.

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