HATESHIELD
Reducing online hate — to prevent real world violence
Online hate is a virus that can hurt and kill people. Our mission is to reduce online hate and racism to help prevent real-world violence.
Users want to protect their families and communities from hate and violence.
Our solution, HateShield, uses crowdsourced flagging and bot algorithms to capture, analyze, and report information. We plan to comprehensively capture all online hate content to help legislators, IT companies, activists, law enforcement, researchers, and individuals promote systemic change.
Our team includes technical co-founders with 25+ years experience at the enterprise level who helped develop the privacy and data security aspects of the Obamacare platform in the US, as well as the BC, Alberta, and Ontario e-Health Portals.
Doing What’s Needed
HateShield is being designed to:
Empower the average citizen to easily report hate incidents & hate bias. The vast majority of these are unreported to which institutions.
Allow users to be anonymous and decide in what level of detail the hate incident, bias and/or crime will be reported
Provide law enforcement necessary qualified data in line with Uniform Crime Reporting standards to inform real time trends based on locational reporting.
Support victims of hate by connecting them to jurisdictional support from law enforcement, local city council, local MLAs & MPs, local academic institutions studying racism, localized social services supporting victims according to their race, religion, orientation for further localized community support.
Be an independent and neutral platform to capture and report hate content to large social media technology companies such as Facebook (Instagram, WhatsApp), Twitter, Google, Snapchat & TikTok, amongst others. The data set can be shared with law enforcement and concerned community, government, and academic stakeholders. The model for this is the EU Code of Conduct. This is yet to be implemented in North America.
HOW HATESHIELD WORKS
1. RECEIVE REPORTS OF ONLINE/REAL-WORLD HATE CONTENT AND INCIDENTS
Provides a simplified and intuitive reporting function for users to flag online hate content such as pictures, videos, texts, etc. or report real world hate incidents such as threats or vandalism (mischief).
2. CONNECTS USER REPORTS WITH STAKEHOLDERS
Based on the type of report, and user preferences, we send requests to social media companies (Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube etc.) to remove the hate or bullying content, law enforcement to investigate an incident, or social organizations to provide support such as counselling, follow-up. We share our summarized data with academics, organizations, and politicians to help them implement policy and allocate resources.
3. PROVIDES RESOURCES AND FEEDBACK TO USERS
HateShield provides a list of resources for users to contact — customized to their specifications and needs. We keep them appraised of the status of their report if they wish.
4. ANALYZE DATA TO PROVIDE REAL-TIME STATISTICS AND METRICS
We provide access to real-time data for our stakeholders which can be used in informing their decisions, systems, resource allocation, and policies.