UK police are using AI to spot spikes in Brexit-related hate crimes

THE UK police are monitoring hundreds of thousands of Twitter posts containing hate speech every day. It is part of a pilot project to predict spikes in hate crimes in the run up to 31 October, when the UK is due to leave the European Union. The Online Hate Speech Dashboard is being used by analysts at the National Police Chiefs' Council's online hate crime hub, which was established by the Home Office in 2017 to "tackle the emerging threat of online hate crime". It gathers Twitter posts from across the UK and uses artificially intelligent algorithms to detect speech that is, for example, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic or directed against people from certain countries or with disabilities or from LGBT groups. The police chiefs' council tasked Matthew Williams at Cardiff University, UK, and his colleagues with developing the dashboard so that government organisations could monitor hate speech.