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: 2) by art guerrilla on Friday February 24 2017, @09:19PM
oh, i have NO PROBLEM with google doing some idiotic 'rating' of toxicity of words...
for one, it is so beautifully orwellian as to be breathtaking, i am truly agog with their brazen hubris...
(but then, that appears to be the googs real stock in trade...)
my problem is if they are going to deprecate rankings or listings or searches, etc BASED on their idiotic rankings...
if they want to put them up on the search results -green = some % 'toxic' range, blue = some %, etc- but still show them, then they can do whatever idiot shit they want... especially if i can turn their idiot shit off...
again, the main point is, IF it is totally 'advisory' and just simplistic propaganda, it is their sandbox, they can do wtf they want... BUT, IF THEY ACTUALLY jigger the search results based on it, then, not just no, but, fuck no; THAT is being unfair and rendering their results suspect to me...
THEY ARE FORCING THEIR/OTHERS MORALS AND PREJUDICES ON ME...
(as it is, don't use their search shit any more, because, fuck you, googs, is why...)