Life After Hate

In the wake of last week’s terrorist attacks on two mosques in Christchuch, NZ, our partners at @WeCounterHate saw a surge in anti-Muslim tweets and RTs. (a thread ...)

#WeCounterHate combats hate speech on Twitter using artificial intelligence to tag, and track, tweets that use dehumanizing language to attack people. Here’s what we found in the tweets the AI reviewed:

• Anti-Muslim hate speech increased 8x in the three days following the shootings. • Retweets of anti-Muslim hate speech jumped 91 percent.

• Likes of anti-Muslim hate speech increased by more than 125 percent. • There was a 62 percent increase in language that evokes “polarization,” which is the second highest-intensity form of hate speech on our scale. That’s one step behind explicitly calling for violence.