Toxic comments in media get a tech fix

Google incubator to use machine learning to help weed out hate

High-tech fixes are in the works for toxic online comments on media sites.

Jigsaw, an incubator company within Google’s parent company Alphabet, has developed a technology it says news publishers could use to make it easier to moderate discussions and lessen the adversarial nature of comments sections at the end of articles.

Other media-technology collaborations also aim at cutting down slurs and harassment, without the resource-heavy process of editors scanning thousands of comments.

Comments sections that quickly spiral into hate-fests have led many media sites to drop comments, even as most online publishers are desperate to increase engagement with their users. Count The Week, The Verge, ReCode, Reuters and Popular Sci

ence among those who have dropped them over the past few years. So did For The Win, a USA TODAY Sports site. Wired even created a timeline on the demise of comments sections.

Those sites had reason for concern. Most U.S. Internet users (72%) have seen harassment online and nearly half (47%) have experienced it, according to a report released in November by the Data & Society Research Institute and the Center for Innovative Public Health Research.

Website comments sections were a likely scene of online harassment. Some 22% of Internet users who participated in a 2014 Pew Research Center report said it happened to them there.

Jigsaw has what could be a countermeasure for media and other online sites seeking to foster civil discussion on news and other topics. The technology, called Perspective, rates toxicity of online comments — each new

comment is compared to a massive collection of conversations already rated. Using machine learning, Perspective constantly evolves its ratings as new comments are added to the data set.

Other tech fixes are in the works, too. The New York Times,

The Washington Post and Mozilla are collaborating on The Coral Project, a project funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. A beta version of a customizable online discussion solution is due in the coming weeks, with tools to help community members avoid harassment and help engagement editors better identify and control negative interactions.

“Our philosophy behind this is very simple,” said Jared Cohen, president of Jigsaw. “The loudest voice online should not win. Conversations online should be con- versations that invite everyone to participate in, and right now the issue we have is the loudest voices are driving many people away from the conversation.”

Cohen was recruited by then-Google CEO and now Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt in 2010 to launch Google Ideas, which was renamed Jigsaw last year. An autonomous think tank and innovations lab within Alphabet, Jigsaw develops technology to address online security issues. In assisting Jigsaw, The New

York Times provided access to about a decade of its online comments and is testing Jigsaw’s technology to help its moderators sort through comments more quickly. The Economist, The Guardian and Wikipedia have also partnered with Jigsaw to experiment on their sites.

“Our philosophy behind this is very simple. The loudest voice online should not win.” Jared Cohen, president of Jigsaw