Meedan joins Documenting Hate

Coalition launched to build database of reported hate crimes and bias incidents in the US

This week ProPublica launched Documenting Hate, a new coalition of organizations working to build an authoritative database of reported hate crimes and bias incidents in the United States. Meedan is proud to announce our participation in the coalition, which will utilize our open-source collaborative verification tool Check.

Building on the collaborative model of the Electionland project, Documenting Hate will see reporters, student journalists and civil rights groups working to gather data and reports of hate crimes from a range of sources, including social media. Participating students, researchers and reporters will be trained in verification skills by First Draft, and will verify reports on Check. Led by ProPublica, the coalition also includes BuzzFeed, WNYC, Univision and NYT Opinion among several others.

This initiative comes at an important time: in the days and weeks following November 8, 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented hundreds of cases of hate crimes, yet there remains no reliable national data on such incidents, and no government agency documents lower-level incidents of intimdation or harassment. Meedan is proud to be able to support the work of the coalition through our ongoing design and development of Check, which will serve as the space for collaborative verification of reported incidents that ProPublica receives. We’ll be writing about our contributions to Documenting Hate in the coming months.

For more information on Documenting Hate and a full list of coalition partners, see:

https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/hatecrimes

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/opinion/why-we-need-a-project-to-document-hate-crimes.html