On Thursday, Manoj Jha, a member of Rajya Sabha from the RJD party formally asked for a law to regulate online hate speech and to upgrade information disclosure regarding paid content.

He raised the issue in the pre-noon session in the Upper House of the parliament and said that the online sphere used to spread hate speech is growing to new heights.

Jha also highlighted that even the new channels are broadcasting TRP-centric news without checking the facts being discussed over the News Videos. He outlined among other requirements for the legislation, that the law should intend to detect, monitor, and safeguard against the coordinated inauthentic behaviour, the misuse of online account bots, for the spread of hate speech.

Adding a note of caution, MP Jha further said that the law should be brought after discussion with the various stakeholders in order to get a balance between the censorship of the harmful content & maintenance of freedom of speech & expression.

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The RJD MP, who often participates in debates on various issues over national channels like the Rajya Sabha TV,  pitched for including internet education in the school curriculum so that the basic knowledge that the children get can be impacted. He also said that the law should put a framework where the impacts of the online media dishing out hate speech on the sensitive-children can be monitored & necessary actions can be taken to counter and flag such contents.

Countering Hate-speech

In parallel development to counter the hate speech and their impacts on the society, various researchers are investigating how “Deep Learning” can be used to train a model to detect hate-speech in cyberspace. Tools like Recurrent neural networks and Convolutional neural networks are being investigated and researched upon to counter the issue of hate-speech.