Since August, the Public Space Electronic Demoscopy team (DEEP) of the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso (PUCV) has been monitoring online violence –mainly on Twitter– against the Constitutional Convention (CC). For this they use the tool they called “The Odiómetro”, which showed that the former Minister of Planning under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, Sergio melnick, leads the attacks on social networks against the constituent body.
According to the teacher Pedro Santander, PhD in Linguistics and director of the DEEP-PUCV project, Melnick “leads the digital troop of the extreme right. We had detected him since the (constitutional) plebiscite,” he told The counter.
According to Santander, the former minister of Pinochet is a “network authority”, that is, a person who in the digital world “has a lot of influence.”
In that sense, he assured that Melnick “leads the hashtags against the Convention. “One of them has been #LonconRenuncia, hashtag created on November 4, when the president of the constituent body, Elisa loncon, called not to extend the State of Exception in the provinces of Biobío and Arauco (Biobío Region), Cautín and Malleco (La Araucanía Region).
On the other hand, the director of the DEEP-PUCV project explained that, from a cross between the database on the people who supported the Rejection in last year’s plebiscite and the accounts that attack the Convention, they detected that 8,048 of far-right were participating in online violence against the constituent body.
The Odiometer
The Odiometer is an artificial intelligence tool, developed 100% by #DEEP, capable of detecting hate speech around CC in real time. This technology efficiently emulates human behavior faced with the task of distinguishing between neutral messages, contrary messages and hate messages (online violence) against the Convention and any of its members.
For its construction, techniques from the area of machine learning, based on conceptual definitions from international law and from the definition of hate speech that the CC proposes in art. 21 of its Ethics Regulations.
The tool has undergone cross-validation, which implies that you have performed multiple experiments to see its generalizability. This means that the goal of getting it to function properly when faced with new social media messages that it has never processed is successfully met.
Until now, the performance metrics allow us to affirm that The Odometer discerns with 85% accuracy, which is a very high performance by national and international standards.
Hate speech
Hate speech is included in online violence. These attacks are concentrated against Elisa Loncon, “both because of her condition as a woman and because of her condition as a Mapuche,” Santander said.
Likewise, it specified that hate speech is directed exclusively towards the Mapuche people, and not against the other original nations present in the Convention (Aymara, Rapanui, Quechua, Atacameños, Diaguitas, Collas, Kawéskar, Yagan and Changos). “It is towards the Mapuche people, clearly,” said the director of DEEP-PUCV.
In addition, these types of attacks are also directed at women, from all political sectors. “Conventional women in general have also received hate speech. That is cross-cutting,” she added.
