Social media services make it possible for an increasing number of people to express their opinion publicly. In this context, large amounts of hateful comments are published daily. The PHARM project aims at monitoring and modeling hate speech against refugees and migrants in Greece, Italy, and Spain. In this direction, a web interface for the creation and the query of a multi-source database containing hate speech-related content is implemented and evaluated. The selected sources include Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook comments and posts, as well as comments and articles from a selected list of websites. The interface allows users to search in the existing database, scrape social media using keywords, annotate records through a dedicated platform and contribute new content to the database. Furthermore, the functionality for hate speech detection and sentiment analysis of texts is provided, making use of novel methods and machine learning models. The interface can be accessed online with a graphical user interface compatible with modern internet browsers. For the evaluation of the interface, a multifactor questionnaire was formulated, targeting to record the users’ opinions about the web interface and the corresponding functionality.
This article examines the integration of participatory journalism policies in the websites of Greek daily political and financial newspapers. A survey conducted in these websites revealed a very reluctant attitude towards tools and applications that involve users in the production of news. The study identified the adoption of few and limited user-generated content (UGC) initiatives, which mainly allow readers to interact with the journalists’ work after it has been published, rather than produce their own content or take part in the initial stages of news production process. When users can create their content, this process is regulated by rules set by the editors. Furthermore, it was found that Greek newspapers use a number of methods, such as moderation, registration and CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), in order to avoid problems caused by the coexistence of professional and amateur content and to ensure the quality of their websites.
During the last two decades, citizens’ participation in news production process has attracted significant interest from both academia and the media industry. Media production and consumption have been altered considerably and traditional concepts, such as gatekeeping, have been under discussion. Many news organisations include in their websites tools and applications that allow users to be active consumers or even co-producers of journalistic content, by liking, sharing, commenting and submitting material. At the same time, large amounts of user-generated content are uploaded every day on social media platforms. Subsequently, media organisations must deal with continually available information which requires management, classification and evaluation not only to keep high journalistic standards, but also to avoid problems. The latter category can include grammar mistakes, fake or misleading information and hate speech. All the above-mentioned parameters highlight the obvious need for platforms that can support journalism manage practice. Such a platform should utilise semantic technologies, which can support organised collection and moderation of content in an effective way and in short time. This study discusses the design and the implementation of a participatory journalism management platform.
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