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University of Cambridge researchers are hoping to launch technology that blocks online "hate speech" similar to how an antivirus program stops malicious code.
Thanks to researchers at the University of Cambridge, the largest social media companies in the world may soon have the ability to preemptively quarantine content classified by an algorithm as "hate speech"." On October 14, 2019, researcher Stephanie Ullmann and professor Marcus Tomalin published a proposal in the Ethics and Information Technology journal promoting an invention that they claim could accomplish this goal without infringing on individual rights of free speech. Their proposal involves software that uses an algorithm to identify "hate speech" in much the same way an antivirus program detects malware. It would then be up to the viewer of such content to either leave it in quarantine or view it.
The basic premise is that online "hate speech" is as harmful in its way as other forms of harm (physical, emotional, financial...), and social media companies should intercept it before it can do that harm, rather than post-facto by review.
Tomalin's proposal would use a sophisticated algorithm which would evaluate not just the content itself, but also all content posted by the user to determine if a post might be classifiable as "hate speech". If not classified as potential "hate speech", the post occupies the social media feed like any regular post. If the algorithm flags it as possible "hate speech", it will then flag the post as potential hate speech, making it so that readers must opt-in to view the post. A graph from the proposal illustrates this process.
The alert to the reader will identify the type of "hate speech" potentially classified in the content as well as a "Hate O'Meter" to show how offensive the post is likely to be.
The goal of the researchers is to have a working prototype available in early 2020 and, assuming success and subsequent social media company adoptions, intercepting traffic in time for the 2020 elections.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Wednesday January 01 2020, @09:15PM (4 children)
How? So I'm allowed free speech under restrictions, is that really free speech then? Not if you ask me, but then I doubt they will. So who is going to define this hate speech? I'm fairly sure the laws are not exactly the same across the globe and if this is going to work on the Internet and not just your own national snowflake lan you might be in a bit of a problem. Not to mention that I doubt everyone as previously noted and mentioned are going to agree. That said a lot of the "comment" platforms used by a lot of the large media companies already does this sort of thing. So I guess they are the potential future customer of this shit.
I do admit that I have not really kept up with anti-virus technology the last decade or so, it was kind of crap before and from what I know it has not really developed all that much as an idea or concept, but are they still not mostly working from signature files and possibly also system monitoring of various important files and such? So that is what the amazing algorithm of hate is going to do then? Cause it worked so great with virii and malware, sure there might have been more without the software but still the user-error behind the keyboard is still around infecting system after system with malware due to stupidity and having the urge to click all the attachments.
I predict this will be more or less as successful as the various porn filters meant to keep the kids away from the naughty images that are online.
Ah so it's going to be some kind of naughty word filter then cause those have not been enough of a massive fucking flop all around. So not only will the post take into account what you write but also everything you have ever written online. So it will flag you as some kind of a hate monger then if you routinely call people cunts and tell them to fuck off when they are being annoying. Assuming this is not going to be looked up every time but saved in some kind of database of haters is this thing GDPR compliant? I know they are BREXIT:ing in a month or so but still if you wanna do biz with the rest of euroland this will still apply.
Hate speech is probably one of the more stupid ideas around. Why not just live with that not everyone is going to like what you like, think what you think, say what you say and eventually tell you to go fuck yourself when you are being a bit of a cunt. If you can't just learn to ignore idiots then you are just to soft for this world.
(Score: 2, Informative) by barbara hudson on Wednesday January 01 2020, @11:11PM (1 child)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2020, @12:12AM
Kind of a worthless reductio ad absurdum style of argument.
A Polish, Soviet-era joke that sums up the left wing "speech has consequences" attitude:
In Poland, there is freedom of speech.
In America, there is freedom after speech.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2020, @08:05AM
From my reading of it, GDPR won't technically apply, the scheme looks at the content, not the poster of the content, and decides if it offendeth whatever sensibilities these crypto-fascists have biased..sorry, trained their system with, and if the e-RMVP says 'ja' then your content passes, 'nein' it gets blackholed....
Nothing along the lines of 'personal data' is stored, per se, as they wouldn''t want to subject themselves to any inconvenient legal scrutiny, but I suppose if your missives flag as 'hate speech' on part of their content, you could argue that this is procsssing of personal data if the rest of it is then mined for new data to further train their AI, but legally you'd be very hard put to prove which chunk of their neural net/other code fuckwittery personally identifies you alone.
Ok, so the crowd who're spouting this shit are based in Cambridge, which is probably why you've thrown in a snide remark about Brexit. I would point out that the Foundation behind this is the brainchild of a German..and the muppets employed by said foundation to come up with this scheiße are probably (by their profiles on the foundations webshite) all conformist europhiles, no doubt all sorely vexed by the fact that the normally sheepish population of England didn't swallow all the EU funded/orchestrated pro-EU propaganda but went for the anti-EU 'hate speech'', hence the need for this jolly little project..
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday January 03 2020, @02:50AM
If freedom of movement is restricted by driving speed limits, is that really freedom of movement?
(point: the moment you accept living in a group, you already gave up a good part of your "freedom". The larger the group, the more your personal freedom is restricted by more and more abstract rules - to the point of groups as large as society that rely on laws so much that they may justify them by inventing the abstract concept of "justice", which should "fiat" even if "pereat mundus")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford