The European Observatory of Online Hate defined

By Jordy Nijenhuis & Hannah Richter

Last month, the European Observatory of Online Hate conducted its first set of roundtables in Antwerp and Bratislava. The roundtables saw experts from NGOs, CSOs, law enforcement, academia, and tech companies, coming together to discuss how we can combat hate speech using our new dashboard. The dashboard is a monitoring tool that uses cutting edge AI tools, to monitor hate in all 24 official languages of the EU. 

With fruitful discussions on the development of the EOOH project, we brought our experts up to date on how the dashboard has been progressing. The experts were excellent in providing feedback on how to improve the dashboard and add new features to create the best monitoring tool possible. 

By having roundtables in both the east and west of Europe, we were able to host a variety of experts from different nationalities and backgrounds. We attempted to cover as much of Europe as possible, and as we have more roundtables to follow, we will be able to expand our network even further to include experts from all EU countries. 

We asked our experts to define what the European Observatory of Online Hate is to them. A tool. A platform. A collaboration between different organisations working together to combat online hate. With increasing difficulties in combating hate, disinformation and polarisation in society, the tool that the EOOH is building is essential in understanding the European online landscape.