More than 500 Rohingya vanished at sea - what happened? Two boats carrying an estimated 530 Rohingya asylum seekers left Myanmar's Rakhine state on 29 June, and have not been heard from since. The equivalent of a jumbo jet full of people has vanished. It is very likely that they both capsized. The monsoon has started, the seas are rough, and the boats - usually old fishing trawlers converted to carry as many people as possible - are barely sea-worthy with unreliable engines.

You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. A new system leverages artificial intelligence to rapidly analyze hundreds of thousands of comments on social media and identify the fraction that defend or sympathize with disenfranchised minorities such as the Rohingya community. The Rohingyas began fleeing Myanamar in 2017 to avoid ethnic cleansing. Human social media moderators, who couldn't possibly manually sift through so many comments, would then have the option to highlight this "help speech" in comment sections. "Even if there's lots of hateful content, we can still find positive comments," says Ashiqur R. KhudaBukhsh, a postdoctoral researcher in the Language Technologies Institute (LTI) at Carnegie Mellon University who conducted the research with alumnus Shriphani Palakodety.