Background & justification

The rise of hate speech is an urgent problem for communities, governing bodies, and online platforms around the world. Indeed, governments and civil society, private sector and international organizations have come together on numerous occasions to determine how to regulate incitement of violence against protected groups. Precise recommendations emerging from these forums include the need to:

1) create a mechanism to monitor and receive hate-speech complaints,
2) gather data on hate speech, and
3) educate the general population on the remedies available to combat the rise of hate speech.

In 2020, ALTSEAN and APPAP decided to create a mechanism for people in Burma/Myanmar and Malaysia to report incidents of hate speech: the SOS Hate App. SOS Hate was developed in collaboration with Burma-based Seagull and Malaysia-based Beyond Borders to support the creation of a trilingual product. The development of the app was informed by in-person focus groups in Burma and Malaysia, and the technical design of the app was executed by Sonder, a Digital Marketing Agency based in Brisbane, Australia.This tool responds to the needs exposed by grass-roots, academic, and civil society actors, and aims to offer a useful and interactive alternative for reporting hate-speech incidents.

App design

The core concept driving the development of this app was to ensure that users would get feedback from the platform. Many existing complaint mechanisms used to report hate speech, such as Facebook’s features for a reporting content, only allow people to send complaints into a void, from which they almost never receive a response. The app seeks to address this issue in three ways:

1) It tells users, based on information they input into the app, whether the hate speech violates any provisions of online platforms, as well as whether the hate speech violates any laws of their country.
2) In addition to providing the user with this information, the app makes it possible for app staff to contact the user and provide guidance on pursuing a remedy, if the user has consented to this.
3) It collects complaint data on the back end, allowing app staff to send aggregated incident data to platforms like Facebook, to show how prevalent hate speech is on the platform and advocate more effectively for action by the platform service.

A second advantage of this app over others is that it provides users with resources if they feel they are in danger—particularly of self-harm—or otherwise experiencing negative psychological effects of the incident they are reporting. There are contact details for resources available to users in both Burma and Malaysia.

The app also allows users to decide on the degree to which they move forward alone or receive assistance from app staff. Upon completion of the app, the user is presented with the information they need to pursue various types of action; but also asked to grant or deny consent to a staff member reaching out to assist her/him with the process. Should a user consent, an app staff member will reach out to her/him to find out more, counsel on next steps, and potentially help the user to file a complaint.

Rationale: people opposed to additional dialogue with app staff, whether for privacy, safety, or other reasons, can pursue a remedy on their own; people who are willing to discuss the incident will be given all the help that app staff can provide.

Staff who receive user complaints—and, when appropriate, respond to users—have received training on how to do this effectively, including sensitivity training.

Output data for the user

Depending on the user’s responses to the questions presented in the app, (s)he will be presented with some or all of the following:

• Details of specific provisions of Burma/Malaysia law that may have been violated during the incident, so that the user can pursue legal remedies;
• Information, in detail, about how to submit a complaint to the online platform where the user experienced the incident;
• Information about how to send an official complaint to human rights bodies/mechanisms;
• Links to resources to learn more about hate speech and preventative measures; and
• Contact information for the user to get involved with local hate speech community groups in Burma or Malaysia.

Users are also asked about the results they are hoping for by using the app, with the option to suggest a result that is not already contemplated in the app’s creation. This can inform future development.
Rationale: based on desk research, these are the best available means of recourse for people who have experienced hate speech in Burma or Malaysia. An additional option—reaching out to the perpetrator of the hate speech to seek reconciliation—was excluded over privacy and safety concerns.

Follow-up

While interfacing with the app, users are asked whether they consent to sharing their information with app staff, and if so, they are asked for their contact details. Assuming that they do consent and share this information, an app staff member will reach out to the user as soon as possible to follow up on the complaint, learn more about the incident, and discuss next steps with the user. At any time, the user has the option to discontinue conversation with app staff—the user’s preferences are paramount.

Data collection

After a user completes the series of questions in the app, their data is automatically input into a spreadsheet that is visible only to app staff. This will allow app staff to analyze aggregated data from users and learn about hate speech trends in Burma and Malaysia. Users must indicate whether they consent to their information being used in aggregated, anonymized complaints to the UN or social media platforms, being used in aggregated, anonymized public reports, or neither.

Information collected by app staff, analyzed, and potentially used in complaints or reports includes:

• Where the event occurred
• Whether specific provisions of Burma or Malaysia law seem to have been violated
• The social media platform on which the incident occurred, if applicable
• Whether the social media platform’s rules for speech seem to have been violated
• The grounds of hate speech (e.g., religion, gender, sexual preference)
• Whether the alleged hate speech was in a private or a public comment
• Whether the user was the victim or a witness to the incident
• What results the user hopes for
• Demographic information (optional): gender identity; physical impairment; age; ethnicity; sexual orientation; religion
• Information on the incident’s impact (optional) on the user’s: sleep; eating habits; feelings of security of the user or another; substance use; relationship with a group associated with the alleged perpetrator

Safety and security

As noted above, the app is designed with user safety and privacy in mind. It asks for consent for any communications between app staff and the user following app completion, and consent for the use of anonymized, aggregated data. The user’s data will never be shared with other parties in a way that is attributable to the user, unless the user gives informed consent to this at a later time.

The app’s technical design likewise prioritizes user privacy and security. It does not use cookies or similar tracking technologies. Website and user data is hosted in Australia, on Google Cloud Platform servers. It uses data loss prevention (DLP) strategies and tools to prevent data from being stolen, lost, or accidentally deleted; storage equipment to provide built-in disk clustering and redundancy; firewalls to ensure that only authorized users are allowed to access or transfer data; and encryption, which alters data content according to an algorithm that can only be reversed with the right encryption key, making it unreadable if stolen.

Before using the app, the user is presented with a privacy policy that explains this in the user’s chosen language (English/Burmese/Malay).

Learning and expansion

The app is a pilot project that explores a remedy to hate speech incidents by: 1) offering a reporting mechanism for victims of hate speech, 2) educating victims and community members on legal recourse, existing reporting mechanisms, and support resources, and 3) gathering data on hate speech instances to improve our understanding of the phenomenon and report on findings to relevant bodies.

Gathering data on hate speech instances is important, as there is still no agreed upon definition of hate speech, and methods for fair and effective regulation remain elusive. Offering victims the opportunity to report the hardships they experience promotes better understanding of the situations protected groups face. The data can also strengthen advocacy efforts. Additionally, hate speech documentation in countries that are not signatories to the ICERD, such as Burma and Malaysia, could represent a step towards further preventative and accountability measures by national and international actors.

It is also critical to assess the role of civil society actors in curbing the rise of hate speech. According to the UN, in order to explore their role, civil society actors must expand their activities including: “monitoring online hate; supporting victims of online hate; monitoring the responsiveness of platforms to reports of online hate; monitoring the response of governments to complaints about online hate; identifying new manifestations of online hate; tracking threats and alerting relevant stakeholders including government; supporting law enforcement by providing data for investigations; supporting other civil society organisations by providing specialist capacities when needed; developing platforms to promote greater coordination in monitoring hate speech; providing information and education to policy makers, platforms, educators, law enforcement, NHRIs, and others; supporting public education through programmes and media engagement; and other approaches.”

The SOS Hate platform will be adapted and improved based on users’ questions and suggestions, and patterns that emerge in the data gathered. If users propose additional effective means of recourse to challenge hate speech—or if other such means become known to the app developers—these will be added to the content of the app. If SOS Hate proves useful for people in Burma and Malaysia, it can be expanded to include languages and resources for users in the broader Asia-Pacific Region.