AddressHate - Research Annotator

Address Hate
· Part-time
· US-based (Eastern Time preferred; NYC-based ideal)

Hate speech online is growing faster than any organization can track by hand. Address Hate is building the tools to change that.

We are a public interest technology company at the intersection of research, AI, and policy. We build detection infrastructure and intelligence tools that help platforms, policymakers, educators, civil society organizations, and real people understand and counter digital hate in real time.

There is no good solution in the for-profit world for this problem, so we are building it. Our mission and the business are the same thing: the better we get at detecting hate, the more valuable our tools become to the world.

Address Hate is hiring Research Annotators to support our core mission: building detection infrastructure that identifies how hate circulates, adapts, and normalizes in digital environments. This is a direct hire position with Address Hate. All work product — including annotated datasets, analytical memos, and contributions to coding schemes — is owned by Address Hate.

We’re looking for annotators with high sensitivity to the layered, implicit, and multimodal forms hate takes online — particularly where meaning is carried through irony, coding, visual reference, intertextual play, and shifting register across platforms. Rather than mechanical tagging, the position requires theory-informed interpretive work that feeds directly into Address Hate’s annotation pipeline and classifier development.

Our work demonstrates that a large portion of hate content in mainstream digital spaces operates through implicit, coded, or multimodal forms — spread through irony, political framing, and shared references that are largely undetectable by automated systems. Understanding this requires human expertise grounded in linguistics, multimodal analysis, and discourse studies.

The role is US-based (Eastern Time preferred; NYC-based ideal) and reports into Address Hate’s research and technology teams.

• Conduct continuous, systematic annotation of social media content across platforms including Tik Tok, X, Instagram, and Reddit
• Analyze textual, visual, and multimodal content, including memes, image–text combinations, and visual rhetoric
• Identify implicit meanings, indirect references, metaphors, narrative frames, and visual-symbolic cues
• Identify shared rhetorical and discursive mechanisms across hate domains — including dehumanization, conspiracy narratives, victim–perpetrator reversal, moral inversion, and normalization strategies
• Analyze intersecting and overlapping hate discourses, including cases where antisemitism, misogyny, and racism co-occur or mutually reinforce one another
• Distinguish between legitimate political expression and harmful discourse, with close attention to context, pragmatics, and discursive positioning
• Participate in regular team meetings and inter-annotator calibration sessions
• Contribute to the iterative refinement of Address Hate’s coding schemes, category definitions, and annotation guidelines
• Work closely with Address Hate’s data science team, translating qualitative insights into structured input for computational analysis
• Produce analytical memos and structured documentation that make interpretive decisions transparent and reproducible

• MA or PhD student (or completed degree) in Linguistics, Discourse Studies, Semiotics, Visual Studies, Media Studies, Hate Studies, History, Political Science, or related field. Candidates with a background in linguistics and multimodal/visual analysis are particularly valued.
• Demonstrated experience with qualitative content analysis, discourse-analytical methods, and mixed methods research
• High awareness of the different layers of hate speech and digital hate — including implicit, coded, ambiguous, and context-dependent forms in both text and imagery
• Native or near-native English proficiency with strong language sensitivity
• Fluency with contemporary social media platforms, particularly Tik Tok, X, Instagram, and Reddit
• Openness and resilience to engage with hate speech content,…