Plug-n-Play Hate Speech Monitoring for Government and NGOs

29-Oct-2019 | Hatebase

Hyperlocal Hate Speech Intake


One challenge shared by many of our municipal government and law enforcement users, as well as by regional NGOs in low bandwidth areas, is the paucity of relevant sightings data at the local level.

Although Hatebase monitors various public data sources for online hate speech, stricter privacy policies and legislation over the past few years have impacted the granularity with which we can geolocate data. This lack of community-level data poses a significant problem for regional organizations and governments, forcing them to do their own monitoring and requiring a non-trivial expenditure of time and resources.

To help solve this problem, Hatebase has developed an easily-installed hate speech intake widget: a form which can be installed on any website using a single line of code.

Because this code is HTML, it's non-executable, which means the only server it runs on is ours, and so it introduces zero security risk to any existing web infrastructure. Once provisioned, it can be self-configured through the Hatebase website, installed on an external website in a matter of minutes, and instantly be available for users to submit hate speech reports. This hyperlocal incident data can then be retrieved through the Hatebase API just like any other Hatebase data.

We've posted complete integration documentation on GitHub, but here's a short "how to" for getting up and running quickly:

  1. Log into the Hatebase website and use the top right dropdown menu to select the IFrame Key screen. Note that this feature is currently only available to users on our community government, law enforcement and nonprofit plans.
  2. Generate an iframe key and specify default location and language. You may also want to whitelist the domain where the form will reside and specify a custom support email address.
  3. Test the form by clicking the "test" link on the IFrame Key screen. Once it looks right, drop the single line of HTML into your own website (see the documentation for what that line of code should be) and then check it out online.
  4. Note that if you're still logged into Hatebase when you look at it, the iframe will recognize you as the owner of the iframe and you'll see a toggle down near the bottom of the form which allows you to submit test reports without entering real data into the database, e.g. you can click through to the "thank you" screen.
  5. Users can now start submitting hate speech incidents which will be automatically geotagged to your region, and will be instantly available through the Hatebase API.


If you encounter any problems, please let us know.


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