[1] Since August 2017, it has also used machine learning and natural language processing techniques to monitor and collect news stories about hate crimes and bias incidents.

The project was launched on 17 January 2017,[8][9][10][11] after the publication on 15 November 2016 of a ProPublica news story about the difficulty of obtaining hard data on hate crimes.

The Index is a joint project of ProPublica, Google News Lab, and the data visualization studio Pitch Interactive.

[13] As of October 2017[update], over 100 news organizations had joined the project, including the Boston Globe, the New York Times, Vox, and the Georgetown University Hoya.

[7] A policy analyst for the Center for Data Innovation (an affiliate of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation), while supporting ProPublica's critique of the present state of hate-crime statistics, and praising ProPublica for drawing attention to the problem, has argued that a nongovernmental project like Documenting Hate cannot solve it unaided; instead, intervention at the federal level is needed.