High School Students Create Search Machines To Detect Hate Speech On Social Media

Nathan Simon (17), a high school student Xaverius Bandarlampung who is interested in technology related to statistics and social issues/ Photo: IST

JAKARTA - Nathan Simon (17), a student of SMA Xaverius Bandarlampung who is interested in technology related to statistics and social issues, succeeded in creating a search engine capable of detecting hate speech on social media. This research is motivated by the many hate speech circulating on Twitter, especially during the 2024 presidential election.

Nathan said this search engine aims to help people make decisions wisely and objectively in expressing opinions or assessing potential leaders and contributing to the progress and welfare of the country, by understanding the problems, background, integrity and vision of presidential candidates.

Many people don't realize that the words they use fall into the category of hate speech. I want to make a tool that can help people to be more aware and careful in using language on social media," said Nathan, Monday, September 16.

In the development process, Nathan has managed to collect around 10,000 words on social media collected and classified as hate speech.

"Most of the hate speech I found came from Twitter, and this is a challenge for me to extract and categorize those words correctly," he added.

This search engine is currently included in a technology competition, namely the International Science And Invention Fair (ISIF 2024) which will take place on November 4-10, 2024. In addition, Nathan plans to develop this machine so that it can be inputted into an application that can be accessed by the wider community.

In the future, I hope that this engine can become a tool for the public to better understand the boundaries of hate speech, so that it can create a healthier and more responsible social media atmosphere. Nathan also hopes that this discovery can contribute to creating a better democratic climate in Indonesia.

"With this search engine or application, people will automatically know that words will appear that fall into the category of hate speech. We hope that we can all be wiser and respect each other in expressing opinions," he concluded.

This search engine is expected to soon be embedded in an easy-to-use application, so that Indonesians can more easily detect hate speech and help create better social media.