NoHate

The NoHate logo
Example Product demo

Inspiration

In 2020, following the murder of George Floyd, a wave of protests sprung throughout the nation, calling for the equal treatment of Black people in America. This year, after isolated incidents of hate crimes as well as the shooting in Atlanta, the Stop Asian Hate movement began to get traction. These events inspired us to research the root cause of hate crimes. We discovered that most hate crimes start as hate speech, which is found in private text conversations between friends. Because no one is born hateful, we decided to stop the problem at its root.

What it does

NoHate is a Chrome Extension (allows more accessibility) that detects hate speech in the user's WhatsApp messages. We chose WhatsApp as it is the largest texting platform, with 2 billion users.

How we built it

We used Javascript's DOM to scrape WhatsApp for text messages and used AJAX to send them to a Python Flask server. Python uses a machine learning algorithm to detect hate speech and sends the data to an HTML file which is the UI for the Chrome Extension.

Challenges we ran into

The first challenge we ran into was transferring the data between languages. We learned JQuery and AJAX to solve this issue. The second was finding a good platform for the project. We settled on a Chrome Extension for 3 reasons. First, it is easily accessible to everyone as Chrome is the most popular browser. Second, with an extension, we would easily be able to scrape the texts. Third, we had never created one before, so it would be a good learning experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of a few accomplishments. First, we built our very first Chrome Extension. Second, we are proud that our product will have a tangible impact in the real world.

What we learned

Outside of the programming experience, we learned that no one was born hateful, and if we could change the environment that breeds hate, we could solve the root cause of the injustices we witnessed throughout the past year. Within the code, we learned how to build a Chrome Extension as well as how to leverage JQuery in our projects.

What's next for NoHate

We want to expand to other platforms such as iMessage, Discord, Slack, Hangouts, Telegram, etc. Secondly, we want to add a feature that stores the user's history of hate speech and periodically send emails with detailed reports of the user's use of offensive language. Finally, we want to make this a mobile app as well.

Built With

Submitted to

Created by

I developed the AJAX requests from one language to another as well as the Python part that does the sentiment analysis. I also developed the web-scraping code.

Vikram Nagarajan
An aspiring full stack developer and machine learning scientist focused on climate and education issues; fluent in Python, Java, JS, and C#
I worked on the pitch of the project and coordinated the efforts overall.

Daksh Goyal
I worked on the project conceptualization and back end of this project. Through this creation, I was able to further my understanding of webscraping and sentiment analysis through machine learning.

Krishna Naik
An aspiring programmer aiming to combine economic research with computer science
I worked on the back end and the pitch of the project. Through this project I was able to gain a solid understanding of webscraping and python modules.

Vishaal Komaragiri