Award for a report that uses artificial intelligence to analyse racism on Twitter
The Catalan Artificial Intelligence Association has presented an award to a research study by the Fundació Autònoma Solidària, the UAB Computer Vision Centre and Novact. The report "Digital racism and COVID-19. Racist and anti-racist discourse on Twitter during the pandemic" has won a prize in the Social Good category.
The research focuses on the case of temporary agricultural workers and seeks to identify and analyse messages with racist content and how what is said relates to the pandemic during the state of alarm in 2020. It analysed 1,063 tweets, making a case study of messages linked to Covid 19 and temporary workers. The results showed that 8.3% of the messages were explicitly racist, 34.9% supported justice or were pro-human rights, and 35.9% were classified as "neutral".
The project was carried out with the support of the Catalan Development Cooperation Agency (ACCD), and the FAS, CVC-UAB and NOVACT were responsible for producing the study. This collaboration has demonstrated the utility of artificial intelligence for the promotion of rights.