A disaster-mapping Page Design Shop platform born of publish-election violence in Kenya is now getting used to screen violence and intimidation in the U.S. Nairobi-primarily based Ushahidi, whose name method “testimony” in Kiswahili, lets customers document records to the platform thru SMS and social media. It has been used to report sexual harassment in Egypt, areas in want after the Haiti earthquake in 2012, and assaults on civilians in Syria.
A version of the platform was deployed inside the US on Nov. 8 to screen the polls, especially for cases of voter suppression. “We don’t assume violence,” Ushahidi executive director Daudi Were said before the vote. While Election Day turned enormously calm, anecdotes of racist and anti-Muslim harassment have surged due to Donald Trump’s victory. Now, the Ushahidi team of workers.
Together with a group of volunteers, they are sorting through more than four hundred reviews of incidents suggested via textual content and electronic mail or published on social media. The group is running with professors at MIT and Harvard andr and activist Shaun Kin to verify and document the reports. So far, Ushahidi has mapped 151 incidents of violence, hate speech or threats, and harassment across the United States.
We are crowdsourcing reports of protest, hate speech, harassment, and violence within the US, and sadly, we are getting lots,” says Ushahidi chief working officer Nathaniel Manning, primarily based in California. The incidents encompass a rape risk left on the automobile of a lady minority in Corvallis, Oregon, college students on a bus in St. Louis taunting a black scholar to “go again to Africa,” earlier than burning him with a glue gun, and white college students chanting “white strength “at their college in York, Pennsylvania.
Even as reviews of harassment are circulating heavily on social media and local information websites, few organizations are tracking such cases nationwide. One of them, the Southern Poverty Regulation Center, has documented 437 incidents of intimidation or harassment since the election, mainly directed at immigrants or black People. The purpose proper now could be to create consciousness about incidences around the USA,” says Angela Oduor Lungati, director of community engagement for Ushahidi, “and raise the voice of marginalized companies experiencing hate after the elections.
