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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday January 01 2020, @07:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the false-positives dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2020, @12:47AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2020, @12:47AM (#938433)

    Unpaid weirdos engaging in cancel culture are a bigger threat than Google and web crawlers alone. They will bombard your employer with messages, get you fired, tarnish your name, drive you to suicide, and dance on your grave. All in the name of virtue signalling for likes and retweets.

  • (Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday January 02 2020, @01:35AM (1 child)

    by anubi (2828) on Thursday January 02 2020, @01:35AM (#938450) Journal

    That kind of crap has been going on as far back as recorded history. Even the Bible has numerous instances of false witness to smear someone else.

    Along with many other things, technology has made even this disgusting aspect of life easier.

    But, on the flip side, it has also made identifying the makers of mud easier as well.

    Hell, I'm guilty of expressing my opinion online too...but 99.9% of the time, it's some paradigm or state of things that draws my ire. I don't want anyone nailed...I see things I see as just plain wrong or inefficient....and I will run it up the pole to see if anyone else salutes.

    If enough salute it, maybe it will influence someone who has the power to change things.

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2020, @02:28AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2020, @02:28AM (#938465)

      The difference today is that the neighborhood busy body doesn't have a reach limited to a couple hundred people at the high end -- they have worldwide capabilities. So while it has been going on for as long as people lived in groups, humans haven't experienced the type of damage those people could do when given a world stage.