Following the outbreak of COVID-19, there was a significant rise in bias and hate crimes directed towards Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI). Many cases made national headlines, but local community efforts revealed that many more went unreported. That’s when The American Asian Foundation (TAAF) teamed up with Stop AAPI Hate to create Decoding Hate.

This project ultimately became an immersive data visualization tool that provides an alternate window into the nature and effect of these unreported hate incidents. The teams spent months leveraging Twitter’s API to collect, analyze and refine data to make this happen.

In a month where we, as a nation, celebrate the AAPI heritage, we begin our highlight of the Decoding Hate project in the hopes that the developers who worked to shine light in the darkness can inspire others in their community and around the world. From our case study outlining the technical aspects of the project, to our new Global Scope blog content series and Behind the Code video featuring developer voices, each touchpoint comes together to weave a story of how the Twitter Developer Platform can be used for good. 

Learn more about this project in the case study here

Behind the Code

Decoding Hate was brought to life by the innovative developers who collected and analyzed the data, built the machine learning tool, and shared the data through an immersive visualization. The people who built this project are passionate, hard-working individuals that saw the opportunity within Twitter’s API to build for good.

Take an intimate look at the stories, lives, inspiration and ambitions of the humans behind this digital triumph here.

Global Scope: A Jerry Yang Story 

At the center of the Decoding Hate project is one of the founding board members of TAAF, Jerry Yang, more widely recognized as the co-founder of Yahoo! and founder of AME Cloud Ventures.

While there are many organizations that support Asian communities, the rise of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) related hate incidents following the outbreak of COVID-19 signaled to Jerry there was a need for an umbrella organization to support the community as a whole. While working on the Decoding Hate project, Jerry cemented TAAF with the vision of providing multigenerational support for the over 23 million AAPI community members in the US.

Visit here for an in-depth interview with Jerry about TAAF and the creation of Decoding Hate in our new content series, Global Scope. This series features diverse developers in our community and aims to tell their stories and amplify their voices and the amazing things they build with the Twitter Developer Platform.