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from the seven-words-you-can't-say-on-the-internet? dept.
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
The Internet can be an ugly place — one where the mere act of expressing an opinion can result in a barrage of name-calling, harassment and sometimes threats of violence.
Nearly half of U.S. Internet users say they have experienced such intimidation; a third say they have resisted posting something online out of fear, according to the nonprofit Data and Society Research Institute. Women, particularly young women and women of color, are disproportionately targeted.
Now Google is zeroing in on the problem. On Thursday, the company publicly released an artificial intelligence tool, called Perspective, that scans online content and rates how "toxic" it is based on ratings by thousands of people.
For example, you can feed an online comment board into Perspective and see the percentage of users that said it was toxic. The toxicity score can help people decide whether they want to participate in the conversation, said Jared Cohen, president of Jigsaw, the company's think tank (previously called Google Ideas). Publishers of news sites can also use the tool to monitor their comment boards, he said.
[...] Google's troll-fighting efforts trail that of other tech companies and nonprofit groups. Earlier this month, Twitter — which has developed a reputation as a playground for abuse — launched new tools to cut on trolling.
[...] Asked whether the site could result in censoring free speech, Cohen said that the software tool wasn't intended to bypass human judgment, but to flag "low-hanging fruit" that could then be passed on to human moderators.
Because speech should only be free if it's polite and you agree with it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @05:44PM
We can't stuff technology back in the box, so the only realistic alternative is to demand that such tools be optional. Ideally such a tool would also have different options a user can enable such as "hide all posts above 90% toxic" or "flag all posts above % toxicity but do not hide" etc.
The thing about censorship is it often starts off as something small and reasonable. As soon as you let people decide what is best for you then you are on the road to censorship and oppression.
Besides, from the various tests users here have already run it is clear this tool is dumb, it can't figure out simple context!