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posted by Fnord666 on Friday February 24 2017, @12:11PM   Printer-friendly
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.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/02/23/google-fights-online-trolls-with-new-tool/


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Friday February 24 2017, @06:13PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Friday February 24 2017, @06:13PM (#471222)

    You may need a reminder that the constitution was written in a time when only a tiny fraction of speech was not face to face. What was not face-to-face was time consuming or expensive.

    So trolling was quite an endeavor, which either required a genuine investment in time and money, or carried a significant risk of being punched in the face. Both options kept things to reasonable levels which would only interfere with quality of life in extreme cases.
    Mean systematic permanent harassment was clearly not in the mind of people who said speech is absolute, any more than nuclear weapons for the right to bear arms.

    Context is everything...

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  • (Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Friday February 24 2017, @09:09PM

    by art guerrilla (3082) on Friday February 24 2017, @09:09PM (#471318)

    nopey dopey, pseudonymous writing was VERY commonplace then, as well as in europe, as far as that goes..
    not too smart to mock the king as yourself, but under a pen name with reasonable anonymity and plausible deniability, you could do so...
    a HUGE proportion of our revolutionary phampleteering was done under no names or pseudonyms...
    no, a society/gummint/civilization which will not allow free speech is a social structure which has turned on the people, and made them beholden to gummint, instead of gummint beholden to the people...
    based on a true story...

    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday February 24 2017, @09:55PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Friday February 24 2017, @09:55PM (#471337)

      Apples, meet rear-axle grease...

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @09:59PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @09:59PM (#471338)

        Nope, that is quite the apt comparison. To continue it, Googles AI is like paying some local toughs to go tear down / destroy any pamphlets that have undesirable content in them. I can see the usefulness of this tool, but I can also see its application becoming overly broad. The DMCA takedowns should be a huge warning to all, if your content gets flagged by the AI then you'll have to fight to get it back at the very least. Guilt by accusation, people tend to ignore cries for help when a big organization labels the person "bad" somehow.

  • (Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Friday February 24 2017, @10:12PM

    by Anal Pumpernickel (776) on Friday February 24 2017, @10:12PM (#471342)

    So trolling was quite an endeavor, which either required a genuine investment in time and money, or carried a significant risk of being punched in the face. Both options kept things to reasonable levels which would only interfere with quality of life in extreme cases.

    Punching people in the face just because they said something you don't like is unjustifiable.

    Mean systematic permanent harassment was clearly not in the mind of people who said speech is absolute, any more than nuclear weapons for the right to bear arms.

    Even if that is true, that doesn't change the text of the first amendment. You can't speculate about what the founders would think about a 21st century 'problem' when the text itself is unambiguous.

    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday February 24 2017, @10:55PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Friday February 24 2017, @10:55PM (#471355)

      > Punching people in the face just because they said something you don't like is unjustifiable.

      You haven't paid much attention to internet trolls, have you?
      "something you don't like" includes not silly unpleasant banter, but personal insults, private information with an invite to harm you or your family, up to clear death threats.
      The kind of discourse that people would not have if they didn't feel empowered by anonymity, as for centuries it would have resulted in a proper and well-deserved beating.

      > Even if that is true, that doesn't change the text of the first amendment. You can't speculate about what the founders
      > would think about a 21st century 'problem' when the text itself is unambiguous.

      It turns out that SCOTUS has consistently agreed to some restrictions to speech (or WMDs), arguing that a strict unlimited reading of the concise wording could be counter-productive.