The tool is designed as a monitoring and diagnostic tool of the state of the Irish digital public sphere. While it is currently focused on racially-toxic contents, it can be scaled to other forms of hate and toxicity, such as misogyny and homophobia. Using HateTrack, we generated a dataset which was subsequently analysed in terms of the toxic repertoires it contained, the communities targeted, the kinds of people posting, and the events that trigger racially-toxic contents. Finally, we held workshops with students to identify their views on reporting racist hate speech online.
This research was co-funded by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission and the Irish Research Council. It was develop and written by Eugenia Siapera, Elena Moreo, Jiang Zhou of the DCU School of Communications, Institute for Future Media and Journalism (FuJo), Anti-Bullying Centre (ABC), and Insight Centre for Computer Analytics, School of Computing.
The research was launched on 28 November 2018. Watch the launch event here.