Automatically Identifying Islamophobia in Social Media

Social media continues to grow in its scope, importance, and toxicity. Hate speech is ever-present in today’s social media, and causes or contributes to dangerous situations in the real world for those it targets. Anti-Muslim bias and hatred has escalated in both public life and social media in recent years. This talk will overview a new and ongoing project in identifying Islamophobia in social media using techniques from Natural Language Processing. I will describe our methods of data collection and annotation, and discuss some of the challenges we have encountered thus far. In addition I’ll describe some of the pitfalls that exist for any effort attempting to identify hate speech (automatically or not).