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Hostile and hateful remarks are thick on the ground on social networks in spite of persistent efforts by Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and YouTube to tone them down. Now researchers at the OpenWeb platform have turned to artificial intelligence to moderate Internet users' comments before they are even posted by The Star Online.
According to a recent study, nearly 30% of Internet users modified potentially offensive comments after having received a nudge from a moderating algorithm.
Photo: Khosro/Shutterstock/AFP Relaxnews
The method appears to be effective because one third of users modified the text of their comments when they received a nudge from the new system, which warned that what they had written might be perceived as offensive.
The study conducted by OpenWeb and Perspective API analysed 400,000 comments that some 50,000 users were preparing to post on sites like AOL, Salon, Newsweek, RT and Sky Sports.
Some of these users received a feedback message or nudge from a machine learning algorithm to the effect that the text they were preparing to post might be insulting, or against the rules for the forum they were using. Instead of rejecting comments it found to be suspect, the moderation algorithm then invited their authors to reformulate what they had written...
Using tricks to get around the algorithm
While close to 30% of users opted to accept the feedback message and delete potentially offensive text from their comments, more than a quarter (25.8%) attempted to dupe the moderating algorithm.
Source: The Star Online
