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The New York Times Is Expanding Comments With the Help of Google's AI (recode.net)
An anonymous reader shares a Recode report: The New York Times says it is going to expand the availability of online comments from 10 percent of articles to 80 percent by the end of the year, without adding more moderators to its staff. How are they going to do this? With a machine-learning algorithm, of course. The Times today is rolling out a new structure of comment moderation using software from Google called Perspective, developed by the company's incubator, Jigsaw. The Moderator tool will automatically approve some comments and help moderators wade through others more quickly.
There is a link in the article to here where you can input comments that the system will judge to be 'toxic' or not. There is no sarcasm, irony and bullshit detection that I can tell, only a score that is generated by the combination of keywords used.
For example, "The cake is a lie" receives a 50% toxicity score, "The cake is bullshit" receives %90, and "There is no reason to believe the cake exists." is scored 3%. This system merely weeds out the laziest of trolls.
Paid trolls, shills and bots are a real problem that pollute comments. Read comment sections like at the Washington Post, which is one of the few that still allow comments, and you will see that one or two poster with an agenda that follows up every insightful or informative comment with a short, one liner insult. You don't need a perfect insult detector in order to filter out most of the garbage out there, and if commenting sections such as the Washington Post is any indication, then it is absolutely needed.
That said, I prefer Slashdot's moderation system. I appreciate that a well deserved "fuck you" will not be automatically censored or considered 'toxic', but could be awarded the highest visibility as long as the message is appropriate.