A new machine learning app for reporting on hate in America

This led ProPublica -- with the support of the Google News Lab -- to form Documenting Hate earlier this year, a collaborative reporting project that aims to create a national database for hate crimes by collecting and categorizing news stories related to hate crime attacks and abuses from across the country. Now, with ProPublica, we are launching a new machine learning tool to help journalists covering hate news leverage this data in their reporting. The Documenting Hate News Index -- built by the Google News Lab, data visualization studio Pitch Interactive and ProPublica -- takes a raw feed of Google News articles from the past six months and uses the Google Cloud Natural Language API to create a visual tool to help reporters find news happening across the country. The feed is generated from news articles that cover events suggestive of hate crime, bias or abuse -- such as anti-semitic graffiti or local court reports about incidents.