Professionals join hands to counter online hate campaigns

Youth Ki Awaaz, a group of young professionals, have embarked on a campaign to counter the hate speeches on social media including Facebook.
The Digital Masala Campaign, Kolkata part, had brought together young entrepreneurs, techies, social media campaigners and film-makers, held here on December 16-17.
"People are consuming lots of stories and content on net these days and some of the contents are really violent. Teams of young entrepreneurs, citizen journalists and researchers, students are working to counter this negativity as part of our campaign," Founder of 'Youth Ki Awaaz' Anshul Tewari said.
The Kolkata Digital Masala Challenge hackathon is part of a tour of all tier 1 Indian cities to spread the campaign message of peace, cooperation and tolerance," he said.

Before Kolkata, the campaign had taken place in six other Indian cities.
Tewari claimed the campaign also got support from Facebook. "We are working with the FB policy team in India and they have come out for support."

The team has opened a Facebook page on 'Digital Masala Campaign' where projects on the issue by six teams from different cities would feature.
Some of the projects conceived by different city teams at Digital Masala Challenge included a FB messenger chat BOT, based on artificial intelligence where young people falling prey to extremist contents can be reached out, a platform to offer psychological help to fight depression, a web series aimed at finding positive role models and not violent role models.

The accepted projects will be taken up by the team for execution among young social media users.