Google launches tool to help curb online hate speech @ Perspective Tool
AI software aimed at helping publishers identify abusive comments on internet
Google has launched an
artificial-intelligence tool that identifies abusive comments online, helping
publishers respond to growing pressure to clamp down on hate speech.
Google’s freely-available software,
Perspective, is being tested by a range of news organisations, including the New York Times, the Guardian and the Economist, as a way to
help simplify the jobs of humans reviewing comments on their stories.
“News organisations want to encourage
engagement and discussion around their content, but find that sorting through
millions of comments to find those that are trolling or abusive takes a lot of
money, labour and time,” said Jared Cohen, president of Jigsaw,
the Google social incubator that built the tool.
“As a result, many sites have shut down
comments altogether. But they tell us that isn’t the solution they want.”
Currently, the software is available to a
range of publications that are part of Google’s Digital News Initiative,
including the BBC, the Financial
Times, Les Echos
and La Stampa,
and theoretically to third-party social media platforms including YouTube, Twitter or Facebook.
The Irish Times is a
recipient of funding from the Google Digital News Initiative.
“We are open to working with anyone from
small developers to the biggest platforms on the internet. We all have a shared
interest and benefit from healthy online discussions,” said CJ Adams, product manager
at Jigsaw.
‘Toxic’ comments
Perspective helps to filter abusive comments
more quickly for human review. The algorithm was trained on hundreds of
thousands of user comments that had been labelled as “toxic” by human
reviewers, on sites such as Wikipedia and the New York Times.
It works by scoring online comments based on
how similar they are to comments tagged as “toxic” or likely to make someone
leave a conversation.
“All of us are familiar with increased
toxicity around comments in online conversations,” Mr Cohen said. “People are
leaving conversations because of this, and we want to empower publications to
get those people back.”
The New York Times
trial resulted in reviewers being able to check twice as many comments in the
same amount of time, as the algorithm helped to narrow down the pool of
possibilities.
Google is not the first to attempt to curb
trolling online. Earlier this month, Twitter stepped up its efforts by making
tweaks to hide abuse from its users, rather than remove content from the
platform completely.
Its chief executive Jack Dorsey tweeted at the time
that Twitter was measuring its progress against abuse on a daily basis.
In May, US tech groups including Google,
Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft signed a “code of
conduct” with the European Commission that required
them to “review the majority” of flagged hate speech within 24 hours, remove it
if necessary and even develop “counter-narratives” to confront the problem. –
(Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2017)
Source | http://www.irishtimes.com/
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Pralhad
Jadhav
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Khaitan & Co
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