Technology to track abusive comments

Alphabet Inc's Google and its subsidiary Jigsaw on Thursday launched a new technology to assist news organizations and online platforms in identifying abusive comments on their websites.

The technology, called Perspective, will review comments and score them based on how similar they are to comments people considered "toxic" or likely to make them leave a conversation.

It has been tested on the New York Times and the companies hope to extend it to other news organizations such as The Guardian and The Economist, as well as 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, wrote in a blog post.

"They tell us that isn't the solution they want, but we think technology can help."

Perspective examined hundreds of thousands of comments flagged as offensive by human reviewers to learn how to spot potentially abusive language.

CJ Adams, Jigsaw product manager, said the company was open to rolling out the technology to all platforms, without specifying whether that included larger ones such as Facebook and Twitter, where trolling can be a major headache.

The technology could in the future be expanded to trying to identify personal attacks or off-topic comments, Cohen said.

Perspective will not decide what to do with comments it finds are potentially abusive.

Instead, publishers will be able to flag them to their moderators or develop tools to help commenters understand the potential impact of what they are writing.

Cohen said a significant portion of abusive comments were thought to come from people "who were "just having a bad day".

The initiative against trolls comes on the heels of efforts by Google and Facebook to combat fake news stories in France, Germany and the United States after they came under fire during the US presidential election, when it became clear they had inadvertently fanned false news reports.

The debate surrounding fake news has led to calls from politicians for social networks to be held more liable for the content posted on their platforms.

The Perspective technology is still in its early stages and "far from perfect", Cohen said, adding he hoped it will soon be available for languages other than English.        

Xinhua - Reuters