What do you do with hate speech across social platforms? Well, Aindriya Barua did something cool by building an anti-hate Reddit bot which is programmed to detect hate speech and ban the miscreant if needed. The 24-year-old software engineer has a simple yet impactful solution for a pressing problem which tech giants have been trying to tackle for years.
What makes it special is that it detects harmful and derogatory speech in ‘Hinglish’ language (a portmanteau of English and Hindi languages) which is a first-of-its-kind. “As an opinionated queer artist, I often use social media to express my views through art, and hence often end up being at the receiving end of violent trolling and cyberbullying myself. It got me angry and sent me rummaging for a solution using my software and data science knowledge”, says Aindriya in an interview to Analytic India Magazine.
The admin/ moderator of any subreddit can download the code and run it to monitor comments and posts in real-time. Once detected, the bot warns a user if they use hate speech. After three warnings the user is permanently banned from posting on the subreddit. This solution is even applicable on Discord or Telegram.
Today hate speech is spreading wildly, especially with the propaganda machines of political parties, religious groups and many such entities using social media platforms to push their malicious agendas.
There are some legal provisions and legislations which consider some forms as hate speech. Even the IPC has specific sections but there is no legal definition for hate speech in India.
Our only hope is more solutions from people like Aindriya until tech giants fix their AI algorithms, trolls find something better to do and our political and religious parties stop spewing venom.
Keep fighting, Aindriya.
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