Monitoring Hate Speech at a Local Level

The Helsinki Committee for Human Rights started the implementation of the 12 months project “Monitoring Hate Speech at a Local Level”.

The main goal of this project is to provide a system for monitoring hate speech at local level. By carrying out the activities, the team will collect primary field data, and subject it to processing, that will be published in the form of quarterly monitoring reports. A novelty in this concept is that the scope will extend to detecting and registering hate speech on and out of social media. The goal is to detect other media that spread hate speech, but at the same time, to determine the source through the monitoring system. Тhe focus shall be on the monitoring of the discourse between sports fan groups, public events in those municipalities, the writing of graffiti (with such content), cultural and artistic events and so on. The aim is to provide as much coverage as possible to the sources of hate speech and thus to give a clearer picture of this phenomenon.

The Committee also proposes, on the basis of its own analysis, to introduce an alert system when negative trends are detected and, therefore, propose appropriate action measures that will form part of the activities related to communication with the public and advocacy towards the competent local and central institutions in the Republic of Macedonia. On the basis of their own experience and expertise, MHC estimates that through the realization of this project it is possible to detect the sources and forms of hate speech, to determine the trends and their intensity, and to properly prepare a strategy for further addressing of the issues to the public, the media, the institutions and other civil society organizations working in this field.