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Ignoring or hiding endemic societal problems has a poor track record. We believe that a more effective strategy is to understand social problems, demythologize them, and try to come up with quantifiable solutions and effective countermessaging.
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Contextual language analysis is an ambitious task for automation and/or crowdsourcing, but it's not entirely off our radar. Our goal at this point is to focus on vocabulary as low-hanging fruit, and over time broaden our focus to encompass a broader perspective on hate speech.
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Hate speech is difficult to quantify, but most people would agree with Justice Potter Stewart's famous sentiment: "I know it when I see it." Hatebase defines hate speech as any term which broadly categorizes a specific group of people based on malignant, qualitative and/or subjective attributes -- particularly if those attributes pertain to ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexuality, disability or class.
Further, hate speech must be in the common vernacular -- an anonymous definition on Urban Dictionary, or a word you heard once on Law & Order, does not hate speech make.
If undecided as to whether to add a piece of vocabulary to the database, take this test:
1. Does it refer to a specific group of people or is it a generalized insult? If the latter, it's probably not hate speech.
2. Can it potentially be used with malicious intent? If not, it's probably not hate speech.
3. Are there objective third-party sources online which can be used as citations? If not, it's probably not hate speech.
4. If you were to write a program which monitors hate speech on Twitter, would finding it in a random tweet be potentially meaningful? If not, it's probably not hate speech.
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To keep Hatebase's index of vocabulary as searchable as possible, avoid using dashes in vocabulary terms. Use a space instead.
Similarly, while quotes are fine within the meaning of a word, avoid using single or double quotes in the term itself, which just makes things more difficult for search.
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Please use lowercase unless the word is specifically a proper noun.
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Although there may be exceptions to this rule based on circumstance, we recommend that "overheard" denote actually hearing the term used by another person either in your presence or in a live media performance. By this definition, hearing an ethnic slur in a Quentin Tarantino movie would NOT constitute a sighting, but hearing the same term used in a live radio broadcast WOULD constitute a sighting.
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When a unit of vocabulary is entered which is not considered hate speech, and compelling citations cannot be provided to support it, the term is usually disabled, meaning that it no longer shows up on the website and cannot be re-added.
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Hatebase editors may occasionally "freeze" a specific piece of vocabulary, thereby temporarily preventing further editing. There may be several reasons for this, but in general, vocabulary is frozen when (a) the system detects two or more users reverting each other's definitions rather than trying to compromise on a fair definition, (b) recent edits have become polarized, political or incendiary, and/or (c) Hatebase administrators wish to defer further debate while sourcing a neutral third-party definition.
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Hate speech is difficult to quantify, but most people would agree with Justice Potter Stewart's famous sentiment: "I know it when I see it." Hatebase defines hate speech as any term which broadly categorizes a specific group of people based on malignant, qualitative and/or subjective attributes -- particularly if those attributes pertain to ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexuality, disability or class.
Further, hate speech must be in the common vernacular -- an anonymous definition on Urban Dictionary, or a word you heard once on Law & Order, does not hate speech make.
If undecided as to whether to add a piece of vocabulary to the database, take this test:
1. Does it refer to a specific group of people or is it a generalized insult? If the latter, it's probably not hate speech.
2. Can it potentially be used with malicious intent? If not, it's probably not hate speech.
3. Are there objective third-party sources online which can be used as citations? If not, it's probably not hate speech.
4. If you were to write a program which monitors hate speech on Twitter, would finding it in a random tweet be potentially meaningful? If not, it's probably not hate speech.
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Citations should be authoritative, which is always open to interpretation. So while a blog post from a trusted source would be a good citation, a Twitter search link or an Urban Dictionary page would not be.
Because Hatebase is a crowdsourced environment, it's always good to have a supporting citation from a non-crowdsourced environment to further validate usage.
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A variant is simply an alternate spelling of another term in the database. A variant is NOT a synonym or translation.
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Transliteration is the process of transposing a term from one character set into another, for instance converting an Arabic word into Latin characters.
