Press Release: Ushahidi relaunches DocumentHate Project in USA post Charlottesville White-Nationalist Violence

Nathaniel Manning
Aug 15, 2017

Press Release:  August 15th, 2017

In the wake of the US election in November, a spring of hate speech and hate crimes erupted across the country. On November 9th, the day after the election, Ushahidi converted their USA election monitoring deployment into the Document Hate project. They worked with journalist and activists Shaun King to gather and triage reports of hate across the USA. They worked with the non-profit journalist organization, Propublica, to bring these first-hand reports to newsdesks. In the two weeks after the election Ushahidi gathered, verified, and published over 400 reports of hate speech, harassment, and violence.

On Saturday August 12th 2017, in Charlottesville Virginia, James Alex Fields Jr ran a car through an anti white-nationalist rally and killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer. Since then anti white-nationalist rallies and protests, and white-nationalist rallies have popped up across the country.

In light of these events Ushahidi has announced that it is reigniting it’s DocumentHate project in the USA. They encourage citizens to report any hate speech, hate crimes, protests, or rallies across the country. Ushahidi CEO, Nat Manning, said that “Ushahidi will be working to triage these reports and share them with journalists, such as the Documenting Hate project partnership, and with groups like Southern Poverty Law Center, ACLU, and the ADL.” On the Documenthate.org website, Ushahidi says their tools have been used across the world to allow people to speak up against harassment and violence, such as HarassMap, SafeCity, and SyriaTracker. The original Ushahidi was used as a means to bring transparency and safety to Kenyans in the post-election violence of 2008, and was last week used to monitor violence and issues during the Kenyan national elections with the Uchaguzi project, gathering over 8000 reports. 

Ushahidi said that citizens can report to Documenthate via:

Web: https://documenthate.ushahidi.io

SMS: (302) 268-9516

Twitter: #documenthate

Email: documenthate@ushahidi.com

In a blog post published during the launch of the DocumentHate project Manning said that “Ushahidi stands for transparency, justice and human rights. We will fight the abuse of human rights everywhere in the world by building and using technology to help the marganilized raise their voice and create safety and equality.” Roughly 10 of Ushahidi’s 30 person team are in the USA. Ushahidi says they will be keeping a vigilant watch on hate and helping to bring justice and voice to those victims. As citizens we encourage you to help by reporting stories of your own at documenthate.org.