Announcing the 23khz Project

Babka is officially announcing the 23kHz Project - 23khz.babka.net. The goal of the 23kHz Project is to make reporting hate speech online easier by illuminating and explaining hidden messages in online content that may make them hard to identify or explain to someone who isn’t familiar with them.

The term dog whistle means to use suggestive or coded language to either signal information to your supporters, or to make an otherwise socially unacceptable message go by unnoticed.

We use the term “Dog Whistle” because these messages, like the sounds of physical dog whistles, exist just above the pitch we’re able to hear. The lowest range of dog whistle is 23kHz, just above our ability to hear. The goal of the “23kHz Project” is to make online dog whistles audible by explaining them.

The service works by allowing someone who is reporting online content to come to the site, select the dog whistles they see, and then have a report generated that contains a list of dog whistles, with an explanation. This report can be sent to someone reading a report so they can understand the hate speech being reported and the context of that hate speech.

This will make it easier for someone reading a report about hate speech to understand the full context of the complaint without the reporter needing to explain each subtle dog whistle in depth.

Currently the 23kHz Project has antisemitic dog whistles, but we hope to support other categories of hate speech soon.

23kHz is a product of Babka, an online space for Jews and allies, and is released to the community under a Free/Open Source Apache 2.0 license.

Dog training icons created by Sliceon - Flaticon