> “It’s a big job,” Lyon said. “Our human labelers will have to assess and label at least 10,000 tweets.”

This is where my concern comes in. For example the statement "Dang immigrants are taking our God given jobs." vs the statement "An influx of immigrants into a region increases the amount of labor available and decreases the cost of said labor reducing wages." does the second one constitute hate speech? I could see many people arguing it does and just as many people arguing contrary to that. Does this mean the model is really just trained to identify speech the labelers disagree with?

Further the other big problem is that it only tracks twitter, and the disconnect between reality and twitter I've found is fairly broad. Most people I know do not use twitter and those that do almost none of them tweet in any meaningful capacity. So why the heck is that a good barometer. I've found twitter to not be a reflection of a population, but rather a funhouse mirror of the population.

EDIT: Updated first paragraph and fixed some punctuation.

>the team has turned to machine learning, teaching a computer algorithm the difference between xenophobic and nonxenophobic speech so that it can eventually recognize when a tweet is likely to be xenophobic.

meanwhile... "Are popular toxicity models simply profanity detectors?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30066720

The first thing I think of when I see projects tracking "hate speech" is how they differentiate between speech they disagree with (typically right-wing speech) and speech that is truly hateful. Considering that professor associated with this project said, "Nationalist sentiments also promote immigrants’ dispossession and exclusion," my skepticism remains high.

"a project that aims to track anti-immigrant hate speech in real time"

Wow, let's go full dystopian and show the CCP we can do it better. It's frightening that _this_ is what universities (Cornell, in fact) wish to pursue.

They want to automate flagging (and of course naming and shaming) based on completely subjective concepts of "anti-immigrant" and "hate speech". Are statements opposing illegal immigration "anti-immigrant hate speech" -- I'd bet so. Where are the lines? Who decides?

That ostensibly intelligent people have the desire to do this is chilling.