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A new social network, Candid, will use machine learning to try and moderate posts:
We use a deep learning NLP (Natural Language Processing) algorithm, which basically looks at what you're saying and decides ... whether it's positive or negative. So it kind of classifies things as having a negative sentiment or a positive sentiment. It then gives it a score of how kind of strong your statement is — let's say you said something about someone or you threatened someone, it classifies that as saying, "Hey this is a very strong statement," because these kinds of categories are not good in terms of social discourse. And when we do that, we basically say if this thing has a score which is more than a particular level, a cut-off, then we basically take out the whole post. So whether it's self harm or like bullying or harassment, we look for certain phrases and the context of those phrases.
On the line between moderation and censorship
I mean, here is the thing between what is "loud free speech," quote-unquote, right? At some level you should be able to say what you want to say, but on another level, you also want to facilitate, you know, what I would say constructive social discussion. ... There is a kind of a trade-off or a fine line that you need to walk, because if you let everything in, you know the fear is that social discussion stops and it just becomes a name-calling game. And that's what happens if you just leave — like certain discussions, just let them be, don't pull things down — you will see they quickly devolve into people calling each other names and not having any kind of constructive conversations.
They've succeeded in getting some free press, if nothing else.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday August 03 2016, @02:10AM
One issue here is the difference between science and scientism.
Science is the process of figuring out how the universe works by repeated application of observing the universe, theorizing descriptions and predictions based on those observations, and then testing those theories by experiment to see whether they're right. This is undoubtedly a useful activity that can lead us to a better understanding of the universe and allow us to create useful technology that takes advantage of that understanding.
Scientism is a completely different beast. It is the belief that the process of science can, given sufficient time and resources, provide a complete understanding of the universe. This belief is, in fact, disproven in several fields: computer science has demonstrably unsolvable problems, physics has certain questions about quantum states of electrons that has recently been proven to be unanswerable due to mathematical paradox, and even mathematics demonstrably has unproveably true statements about any set of axioms. And just to be absolutely clear, we aren't talking about the sorts of problems where we haven't been able to figure out how to solve them, we're talking about the sorts of problems that any possible solution disproves its own existence. Scientism is very popular among those who have rejected religious nonsense and now wish to belief that they are now completely rational atheists who will through science finally disprove the religious nutjobs. However, it turns out that this belief is as irrational as the belief in "woo" (as James Randi would call it). Which makes sense, because if psychology has taught us nothing else it's that we're all thoroughly irrational even when we believe ourselves to be acting rationally.
So what this all boils down to is that the chain of logic from (A) "science works" to (B) "science can tell us exactly how people think" to (C) "if we know how people think computers can be programmed to mimic that" is far from proven. Science might indeed tell us how people think, and there are a lot of biologists and psychologists trying to do just that. And computer scientists might well be able to mimic aspects of human thought in software, depending on what that thinking actually is. But neither of those steps are a guarantee.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.