The Public Discourse Foundation is a joint collaboration between the Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH), the women’s organization Alliance F and the European Mercator Foundation, which promotes understanding between different cultures.
The foundation is the next stage of the Stop Hate Speech project run by Alliance F, ETH and the University of Zurich.
Since its inception in 2020, the project has already gathered 1,200 volunteers and developed the ‘Bot Dog’ App to monitor and counter hate speech in Switzerland.
The foundation will start working with media and civil society groups from April 1. “Science-based strategies and scalable solutions should help to reduce toxic language and promote constructive engagement,” the foundation’s leadership said on Monday.
“Hate speech is a threat to our democracy. We cannot have people being intimidated by a loud minority,” said Public Discourse Foundation managing director Sophie Achermann.
The first project of the foundation will be to develop algorithms that help the media with the challenge of moderating user comments – to encourage lively debate without abuse.
The challenge of finding the right balance was highlighted last year when Credit Suisse sued a financial blog over alleged abusive comments directed at the bank’s CEO.
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