New Google tool fights online trolls
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 also can use the tool to monitor their comment boards, he said.
People also can feed specific words and phrases into Perspective to check how they’ve been rated.
Cohen emphasized that Perspective was a work in progress and would only improve if people contributed to it.
Google’s troll-fighting efforts trail other tech companies and nonprofit groups. Earlier this month, Twitter launched new tools to cut on trolling. The company said it would begin retaining more user data as part of an effort to prevent people who have harassed other people from deleting their accounts and then re-emerging under a new username. It also said it was tweaking its algorithms to flag certain tweets as “potentially abusive or lowquality.”
Hack a Harassment, group founded by Intel, Vox Media and Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation, is working to raise awareness. Other organizations, such as TrollBusters and Crash Override Network, are support groups for people who have experienced harassment online.
Because there was widespread disagreement on what constituted a personal attack, Cohen’s team ultimately decided not to use “personal attack” as a rating category.
It’s up to publishers to decide how to use the tool. Some may choose to show the scores to readers and use crowdsourcing methods that are similar to current systems where readers can flag offensive language to human moderators. Others may choose to use the data to clean up the language on their own sites.