Earlier this year, I led a team at PeaceTech Lab, in partnership with Media Monitoring Africa, in monitoring and analysing online and offline hateful language trends that occurred during South Africa’s election season. After gathering the information, I analysed the online patterns against offline events and offered insights on the potential relationship between this type of language and instances of violence seen in municipalities country wide. A series of six reports were produced, highlighting trending key terms, along with five blogs to provide a deeper dive into the data.
Read MoreAs South Africans settle in a post-election country, underlying social issues have emerged in the form of hateful language on social media. During our monitoring period, the term mlungu increased significantly after a young white couple was allegedly murdered in Benoni by three black men.
Read MoreWhile the phrase “White monopoly capital(ists)” became prominent on South African social media in 2016 to allegedly benefit corrupt businessmen around President Zuma, today it’s frequently used by politicians offline to broadly target white business people. It reflects a local frustration implying white business people are unwilling to share wealth with a broader group. While there may be white capitalists enriching themselves at the expense of others, the phrase is not always used to imply this, and its context determines its importance.
Read MoreWeeks of intense political campaigns culminated in a largely successfully election on May 8th in South Africa. However, despite the uneventful nature of the elections, our monitoring in this period saw a rise in the use of hateful terms.
Read MoreAs South Africans head to the polls in a pivotal national election today, politicians have seemingly been unable to steer clear of inflammatory and divisive rhetoric during public rallies. The result? A massive trigger in the use of hateful terms on social media platforms.
Read MoreAs South Africa gears up for an election, we’ve been monitoring and analyzing trends throughout the country for several weeks to understand and offer insights on the potential relationship between hateful language on social media and instances of violence on-the-ground. We’ll have a series of reports coming out for the next two months (you can read the first one here and then sign-up to receive the rest). But we realized, we don’t just want to present the data to you -- we also want to explain the effects.
Read MoreI firmly believe that the uptick in online hate speech around the world has a lot more to do with ignorance than it does any issue having to do with ethnicity, tribe, race, or anything else. This ignorance is costing us greatly. All around the world, and especially in my home country of South Sudan, hate speech has caused violence, ignited conflicts, and has had a deeply enormous and negative influence. The world is more connected now, meaning that we can more easily and quickly communicate with people on a very large scale, but that has also meant that people with ill intentions can also easily and quickly spread dangerous speech on a very large scale.
Read MoreOnline hate speech and incitement are on the rise around the world, and it’s become more and more clear to me that we need to find new approaches to tackle this massive problem. Monitoring hate speech shared online is not new to me personally -- given the scale and prevalence of this issue in Nigeria, it’s something I’ve been working on for a long time to develop innovative solutions to this new-age problem. Unfortunately, the methods and means I was using in the past were neither quick nor efficient enough for the wild fire of hate speech. I knew there had to be something better.
Read MoreAn estimated 2.5 million Syrian children have been out of school due to the crisis that has ravaged their home country for years. As refugees move from one location to another in search of respite, children not only miss out on the critical need for structured and formal education but are also subjected to stress and emotional trauma that’s disrupted their ability to learn.
In response to the crisis, the Norwegian government and several global nonprofit partners started the EduApp4Syria competition in January of 2016 as a challenge to activists, experts, and gamers alike to create educational games that aim to help war-affected Syrian refugees. And thus, Antura and the Letters was born.
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