As a matter of general principle, I’m leery of Google’s ongoing efforts to make itself an arbiter of content, particularly since its search engine has become utterly unusable for anything more complicated than finding the location of a store or doing price comparisons. I now regularly get first page results where over eight items don’t match my search parameters. So I’ve abandoned Google.
Google has teamed up with ProPublica, apparently to give the initiative a veneer of legitimacy, to develop a “hate crimes” database. As reported last week in TechCrunch:
Few things are certain in 2017’s fraught national climate, but hate certainly doesn’t look to be going away. In partnership with ProPublica, Google News Lab is launching a new tool to track hate crimes across America. Powered by machine learning, the Documenting Hate News Index will track reported hate crimes across all 50 states, collecting data from February 2017 onward.
Data visualization studio Pitch Interactive helped craft the index, which collects Google News results and filters them through Google’s natural language analysis to extract geographic and contextual information. Because they are not catalogued in any kind of formal national database, a fact that inspired the creation of the index to begin with, Google calls the project a “starting point” for the documentation and study of hate crimes. While the FBI is legally required to document hate crimes at the federal level, state and local authorities often fail to report their own incidents, making the data incomplete at best.
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