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Hate crime study

by Mark Rowe

Researchers from Cardiff University have been awarded £250,000 to help the UK Government monitor Brexit-related hate crime on social media.

A new Centre for Cyberhate Research and Policy, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, will focus on the development of a monitoring tool that displays a live feed of the propagation of hate speech as it happens on Twitter.

The uni hopes that the UK Government will be able to use the tool to identify areas that require policy attention and to improve interventions to stop hate crime from spreading.

Prof Matthew Williams, the principal investigator on the project and Co-Director of the Social Data Science Lab at Cardiff, said: “Hate crimes have been shown to cluster in time and tend to increase, sometimes significantly, in the aftermath of “trigger” events. The referendum on the UK’s future in the European Union has galvanized certain prejudiced opinions held by a minority of people, resulting in a spate of hate crimes. Many of these crimes are taking place on social media.”

Cardiff University’s Social Data Science Lab has partnered with the Metropolitan Police Service, the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office and the Los Angeles Police Department. The lab’s already undertaken several preliminary studies of the spreading of hate speech on social media, most notably around the murder of Lee Rigby in Woolwich in 2013.

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