Crif - Crif publishes first results of its Online Hate Speech Observatory

Press release - First results of Crif Online Hate Speech Observatory

Paris, February 21st, 2020

For several months, Crif has been working on setting up an Online Hate Speech Observatory in order to quantify hate contents over the Internet, in France.

"In order to have a more complete view of antisemitism in France, it was necessary to identify, quantify and qualify the antisemitic contents over the Internet" explains Crif President Francis Kalifat.

Crif worked with the IPSOS Institute on this project. "This is the first time a system was generated to capture every quote on the Internet" said Brice Tinturier, CEO of IPSOS.

Crif Observatory aims to examine all kind of hate contents on the Web. "First, we focus on antisemitism. But we are planning to gradually extend this Observatory to the other hatreds on social networks and that plague society such as homophobia, racism, anti-Muslim or anti-Christian remarks” stressed Francis Kalifat.

Thanks to algorithms Artificial Intelligence tools, Crif Observatory identified 51,816 antisemite contents. This result should however be put into perspective: the Observatory is based only on public accounts and on the basis of the contents remaining online after moderation by the platforms.

The contents recognized as anti-Semitic by the system were then reviewed individually in order to validate their antisemitic nature. Finally, they were classified according to the four categories of antisemitism defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism.