CM Krishnan questions SWC on combating hate in digital spaces
CM Krishnan asks SWC about their experience combating online hate. Mountie describes updating workshops to cover algorithm influence, helping students recognize hate speech and bias online, and teaching them how their interactions perpetuate harmful content. SWC plans to expand programming to elementary and college levels.
Thank you both for your testimony.
I do have a question for SWC.
It feels like the Internet and social media continue to grow as the epicenter.
Of so much hate.
Can you talk a bit more about SWC's experience in combating discrimination in digital spaces and how that work may be growing, if it is?
Yeah, so something that our education team is constantly evaluating is updating our digital literacy workshops and meeting students where they are and meeting the moment.
So something new for this year that we incorporated is background on the algorithm.
And what we find is a lot of students walk away from our workshops having a better understanding of what is hate speech and bias online.
They don't recognize a lot of these things initially, and that's something that we help them educate themselves on.
And we also help them learn how what they interact with online can then further perpetuate what they see.
around messaging.
disinformation, hate speech, bias, and how sometimes what they interact with is constituted as bullying or a hate crime.
And so I think we start as young as we can, and we're looking to start even younger than seventh grade, as early as third grade, elementary school, and we're also looking to expand into college campuses so that we can really
reach students from the beginning and give them a better informed sense of an ethical online presence and really help promote tolerance and mutual respect over division and hate speech.