Monitoring Hate Speech in Indonesia: An NLP-based Classification of Social Media Texts

Musa Izzanardi Wijanarko, Lucky Susanto, Prasetia Anugrah Pratama, Ika Karlina Idris, Traci Hong, Derry Tanti Wijaya


Abstract
Online hate speech propagation is a complex issue, deeply influenced by both the perpetrator and the target’s cultural, historical, and societal contexts. Consequently, developing a universally robust hate speech classifier for diverse social media texts remains a challenging and unsolved task. The lack of mechanisms to track the spread and severity of hate speech further complicates the formulation of effective solutions. In response to this, to monitor hate speech in Indonesia during the recent 2024 presidential election, we have employed advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies to create an improved hate speech classifier tailored for a narrower subset of texts; specifically, texts that target vulnerable groups that have historically been the targets of hate speech in Indonesia. Our focus is on texts that mention these six vulnerable minority groups in Indonesia: Shia, Ahmadiyyah, Christians, LGBTQ+, Indonesian Chinese, and people with disabilities, as well as one additional group of interest: Jews. The insights gained from our dashboard have assisted stakeholders in devising more effective strategies to counteract hate speech. Notably, our dashboard has persuaded the General Election Supervisory Body in Indonesia (BAWASLU) to collaborate with our institution and the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) to monitor social media hate speech in vulnerable areas in the country known for hate speech dissemination or hate-related violence in the upcoming Indonesian regional elections. This dashboard is available online at https://aji.or.id/hate-speech-monitoring.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-demo.15
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Delia Irazu Hernandez Farias, Tom Hope, Manling Li
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
142–152
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-demo.15
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Musa Izzanardi Wijanarko, Lucky Susanto, Prasetia Anugrah Pratama, Ika Karlina Idris, Traci Hong, and Derry Tanti Wijaya. 2024. Monitoring Hate Speech in Indonesia: An NLP-based Classification of Social Media Texts. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pages 142–152, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Monitoring Hate Speech in Indonesia: An NLP-based Classification of Social Media Texts (Wijanarko et al., EMNLP 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-demo.15.pdf