Google announces hate crime news index

(Seeking Alpha) Google announces the Documenting Hate News Index, a cooperation between Google News lab, Pitch Interactive, and ProPublica to use machine learning to track and report on hate crimes around the country.

The project utilizes Google Cloud Natural Language API to scrape the prior six months of Google News for stories on hate crimes, biases, or related abuses and creates a visual tool that makes the information easier for reporters to use.

Hate crimes are nonsense. If something wasn't a crime without the hate part, why should it be with it, when hating others is legal.

I don't understand is this is meant to be an index of crime-reports (public information) or of news-stories. It sounds like the latter, but if you're only focusing on the media and not the underlying incidents it's hard to draw valid epidemiological conclusions.

It seems to be a index as in a index in a textbook as opposed to an index like the DOW from what I can see. I'd like to see something more along those lines for comparisons sake.

Google the gatekeepers, deciding the undecidable.

I find this dangerous.