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This 27-Year-Old From Tripura Is Fighting Hate On The Internet With AI

May 17, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

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Hello,

Aindriya Barua built a bot that tech giants should have—it can detect hate comments, hate codes, hate with context and remove it from platforms, not just for the users. Read on!

Election campaigns, speeches, promises made by politicians—your social media feeds would have it all. But, how well do you know the candidate you're voting for?

Here's how you can source official information about all the nominated candidates in 2024 Lok Sabha elections:

  • Go to the affidavit portal on the Election Commission's (EC) website.

  • You can search by name of the candidate or use filters and choose the state and constituency they're representing.

  • You will see a 'download' button and the affidavit will contain details of movable and immovable assets, liabilities and other personal information.

  • Also, you can access the same information by downloading EC's Know Your Candidate app on your phones.

  • You can also find information about candidates on ADR’s My Neta platform.

This 27-Year-Old From Tripura Is Fighting Hate On The Internet With AI

🔖 Fighting hate using AI: 27-year-old computer science engineering graduate Aindriya Barua from Tripura has made fighting hate a mission in their life. And they are doing it using artificial intelligence.

The USP: Barua’s bot Shhor AI is unique because it can detect code mixed typing where a regular hate speech tracker doesn't work. For instance, when someone uses asterix and exclamations instead of writing the complete slang word. It even detects context based hate speech. Read Adrija Bose’s story.

How Madhya Pradesh Emerged At The Heart Of BJP's Influencer Strategy

🔖 Malay Dixit, Indore BJP IT Cell’s district president, has built a network of 3,000 social media influencers across Madhya Pradesh under the All India Influencers Association.

  • This network works to create and distribute content supporting BJP's policies and countering opposition narratives.

  • Malay and his social media team made numerous such videos against opposition leaders, Rahul Gandhi, YouTuber Dhruv Rathee and others, whenever they questioned the policies and governance of Narendra Modi-led NDA government.

  • In Madhya Pradesh itself, the BJP, the Congress, and other regional parties have organised several meet-ups with groups of influencers from the district to national level, to either co-opt them or make them promote the party’s ideologies and narratives on their accounts. Find out more in Kashif Kakvi’s story.

Ola CEO's 'Pronoun Illness' Remark: Can AI Chatbots Get Your Gender Right?

🔖 The criticism: Last week, Ola’s founder Bhavish Aggarwal took to LinkedIn criticising its AI chatbot for using they/them as his pronouns. Aggarwal labelled it as an inconsistency with Indian cultural norms.

Web of controversies: Bhavish Aggarwal plans to move cloud services from Microsoft Azure to Ola's AI subsidiary, Krutrim, after this controversy. Amidst these developments, controversy is also arising over Krutrim's server locations and Microsoft's involvement. Read Hera Rizwan’s story.

X's Community Notes Struggles To Curb Misinformation In Indian Election

🔖 The limitation: Elon Musk owned X’s crowdsourced fact-checking program Community Notes is struggling to limit misinformation on its platform in India’s highly polarised election where political rhetoric has turned into anti-Muslim hate speech.

Expert’s take: “It’s crowdsourced, which is a cool idea. I love the idea. But the idea that you could have this completely automated algorithm driven way of surfacing quote, unquote “truth” on a platform where truth is very hard to come by is just nonsensical,” Alex Mahadevan, Director of Mediawise at Poynter, told BOOM’s Karen Rebelo.

🚫 Fake News You Almost Fell For

🔍 During an interview, Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed that he did not mention 'Muslims', while speaking of 'infiltrators' and 'those with more children' in one of his speeches during the ongoing Lok Sabha elections. He further adds, "The day I do 'Hindu-Muslim' I will not be eligible to stay in public life." But, his speech says otherwise. Read 🔗 Archis Chowdhury’s ↗️ fact-check.

🔍 A viral video purportedly showing Congress leader Rahul Gandhi predicting PM Narendra Modi will return to power after June 4, 2024 is digitally altered. 🔗 Anmol Alphonso ↗️ debunked the claim.

🔍 Social media platforms were rife with misleading claims suggesting that the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Committee's working paper states a 7.8% decline in the Hindu population and a 43% rise in the Muslim population between 1950 and 2015. Additionally, multiple posts on X amplified this claim with communal undertones. Find out the truth in 🔗 Nidhi Jacob’s ↗️ fact-check.

🅱️ Recommends

📖 This week's recommendation is: Misinformation perceived as a bigger informational threat than negativity: A cross-country survey on challenges of the news environment

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and designed by H Shiva Roy Chowdhury.

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