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Google to help fight off abusive comments
The internet can be a cruel and unusual place.
If you are an avid user of the internet, you know that around every corner, you are bound to run into an 'internet troll' who spend their time just writing abusive and obnoxious comments. It has almost become expected.
However, Alphabet Inc’s Google (GOOGL.O) and Jigsaw, formerly known as Google Ideas, launched a new technology named Perspective, which will help online platforms and news organizations identify abusive comments on their websites.
Perspective will review comments and score them based on the similarity to comments which are referred to as “toxic” by people or comments which likely caused someone to leave a conversation.
The technology had already been tested on the New York Times and the parties involved hope to branch out into other news organizations such as The Economist and The Guardian, as well as other websites.
"News organizations want to encourage engagement and discussion around their content, but find that sorting through millions of comments to find those that are trolling or abusive takes a lot of money, labor, and time. As a result, many sites have shut down comments altogether," Jared Cohen, President of Jigsaw, which is part of Alphabet, wrote in a blog post.
“But they tell us that isn’t the solution they want. We think technology can help.”
Around hundreds of thousands of comments were examined by Perspective, which allowed it to spot potentially which comments can be labelled as abusive language, from existing comments labelled as offensive from human reviewers.
Cohen also added that in the future the technology could be expanded to identify personal attacks or off-topic comments too.
With news like this, we could potentially see the end of keyboard warriors!
