During the municipal elections in spring 2017, a group of researchers and practitioners specialising in computer science, media and communication implemented a hate speech identification campaign with the help of an algorithm based on machine learning.
At the beginning of the campaign, the algorithm was taught to identify hate speech as diversely as possible, for example, based on the big data obtained from open chat groups. The algorithm learned to compare computationally what distinguishes a text that includes hate speech from a text that is not hate speech and to develop a categorisation system for hate speech. The algorithm was then used daily to screen all openly available content the candidates standing in the municipal elections had produced on Facebook and Twitter. The candidates' account information were gathered using the material in the election machine of the Finnish Broadcasting Company Yle.
All parties committed themselves to not accepting hate speech in their election campaigns. On the other hand, if the candidate used a personal Facebook profile instead of the page created and reported for the campaign, it was not included in the monitoring. Finnish word forms and the limited capability of the algorithm to interpret the context the same way humans do also proved to be challenging. The Perspective classifier developed by Google for the identification of hate speech has also suffered from the same problems in recognising the context and, for example, spelling mistakes.
Who wants to play, "Trigger the Algorithm" with false positives? "This mosaic is too dark. Let's use more white tiles here, and here."
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @07:47PM (8 children)
Just wanted to say, back in university it was a known fact in english classes if you find out what your english teacher was "into" and you wrote a glowing paper on that subject it was a guaranteed easy A. Good to see SN going down that road. If I wanted to watch a circlejerk I would turn on some "comedy-news".
(Score: 5, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday October 15 2017, @08:40PM (7 children)
You not being able to tell the difference between propaganda absolutely gushing one-sided bias and newsworthy material is a problem with yourself not with us.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 16 2017, @02:36AM (4 children)
"For further examples of the religion of peace in the news, see what Iran is up to [yiannopoulos.net]."--The Mighty Buzzard [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Monday October 16 2017, @11:58AM
2) TMB is not a editor.
3) Don't you have something better to do than be an idiot on the internet? There isn't exactly a dearth of them.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday October 16 2017, @02:15PM (2 children)
Yep, you kind of made my point for me since that's a fine example of one of my own subs getting rejected for not meeting standards.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 16 2017, @03:34PM (1 child)
It wasn't rejected. It was accepted.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday October 16 2017, @04:17PM
So it was. I stand corrected. Must have been a follow-up I subbed that was rejected.
In that case, let me ask you this: Which bits of it do you consider propaganda? After a reread to refresh my recollection of it, I see some amounts of bias in the story but no more than you'd see in any MSM reporting and the article itself is quite well written and sourced (though the page layout is annoying as hell). Non-excessive amounts of bias the eds tend to allow through if the journalism is otherwise acceptable; see gewg_(OriginalOwner)'s subs from proudly socialist websites for examples of bias quite different than my own making it through to the front page.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 16 2017, @11:38PM (1 child)
There are oh-so-many articles that should have been rejected by your criteria, but oddly enough all the crazy Right Wing Nut Job shite gets through all the time.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday October 17 2017, @12:12AM
Incorrect. Plenty of subs from all kinds of ideologies get rejected. Feel free to inquire of your favorite right-wing type about the accuracy of this.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.