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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: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday August 03 2016, @07:56AM
I much prefer our own method - SN has, to my mind, got the balance about right. Of course, we are not trying to 'monetize' the comments which is possible as long as those relatively few generous souls keep paying for their subscriptions.
There can never be a perfect system. Everyone's idea of perfection is different so the final goal is unachievable for the majority. However, the self moderation that we see here on our own site tends to keep the shills, spammers and trolls down to an acceptable level. Some threads, particularly at weekends, seem to gather a different group of commenters, or at least those commenting let their hair down and perhaps make comments that they wouldn't make at another time. But the dross seems to be identified as such and is scored accordingly so that you can filter most of it out by setting your threshold at a suitable level.
But, perhaps most importantly, we do not censor or prevent individuals from posting whatever they wish unless it is likely to have us on the wrong end of a legal action. We simply cannot afford to get embroiled in such a thing and we have to keep the site active otherwise we have achieved nothing over the last several years.