Promoting Prosocial Software Design and Development for Student Projects

We report and discuss the rising levels of misinformation, hateful and abusive online language, the chaos and societal harm arising from this type of speech and the shortcomings of social media companies in dealing with it. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reports that hate speech and online harassment of both teens and adults increased substantially from 2022 to 2023 for most demographic groups. The Southern Poverty Law Center tracked 595 hate groups and 836 antigovernment groups operating in the US in 2023. The onslaught of misinformation, conspiracies and hate speech is a global threat that must be detected and countered. However, efforts to automate hate speech detection by Machine Learning and other methods are falling short and more research is needed. One approach to counter online hate and negativity is to facilitate and promote its opposite: empathetic, positive speech. Prosocial software development and anti-hate tools are urgently needed. Recent research findings from ETH and the University of Zurich indicate that posting sympathetic messages for victims of racist and xenophobic hate speech can counter it more effectively than other strategies. From our experience teaching ethics and teamwork to upper-level computer science and engineering students and directing Computer Science capstone course projects, we submit that students can be guided and led to develop prosocial software and other tools to counter hate speech and promote civil discourse online. We advocate embedding ethics and teamwork training in the science and engineering curriculum and urge technology instructors and Computer Science and Engineering faculty to direct students to work on design and development of prosocial software. We invite students to use their imagination and creativity in problem solving by participating in inter-collegial competitions on art or software design such as the “Ethics in Action: Art or App Design Challenge” sponsored by the University of Alabama at Birmingham which promotes prosocial artworks and software for smartphones or tablets.