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Alphabet's AI-Powered Chrome Extension Hides Toxic Comments (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Alphabet offshoot Jigsaw is launching a Chrome extension designed to help moderate toxic comments on social media. The new open-source tool, dubbed "Tune," builds on the machine learning smarts introduced in Jigsaw's "Perspective" tech to help sites like Facebook and Twitter set the "volume" of abusive comments. Using "filter mix" controls, users can either turn toxic comments off altogether (what's known as "zen mode") or show selective types of posts containing attacks, insults, or profanity. Tune also works with Reddit, YouTube and Disqus. Jigsaw admits that Tune is still an experiment, meaning it may not spot all forms of toxicity or could hide non-offensive comments. "We're constantly working to improve the underlying technology, and users can easily give feedback right in the tool to help us improve our algorithms," C.J. Adams, Jigsaw product manager, wrote in a blog post.
befuddled by shelter/social/climate issues? there's more than enough 'vacant' planets to expand our manchise spherically? years ahead of getting planets named after you apps,, this one names the planet after you after you arrive there. with billions of destinations to choose from.. you can even wait, & decide when the time is right for you to go cosmical? never any subscription or cover charges,, thanks again..
next; meet the new b&b live app
even if you somehow forget, this clump of nosy code remembers your most recent address(es), co-habitant(s), arrears, owed apologies etc,,, cannot leave home without it.. attempting to rehabitate you elsewhere!? yet another bright lights & loud noise offering..
then; aliens in the arctic shutting off power in southern hemisphere etc..? some still calling this 'weather'?
+ if the real mr. tesla could see us now?
Also known as the, "I'm not mature enough to have my beliefs challenged!" SNOWFLAKE mode
I hear they are working on improving the technology so it can be used for peril sensitive sunglasses.
I for one welcome our censoring AI overlords.
You're selecting for passive aggression, dog-whistles and subtle memes.
So this will end all false outrage right. There is no reason to still be reading whatever you don't agree with.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
1. Toxic to whom? Who but me can decide that for me? (Nobody, if I'm still an individual and not a passive-thinking swarm entity.)
2. Why would I want to ignore them, given that there are still real people behind them. (Even when they use automation to repeat them.) Those people have a reason they post that. Maybe they are mentally ill. Maybe they have been traumatized. Maybe they are right, but contradict our society's wrong expected norms. Maybe we just don't like how they make us feel. Like disfigured people.
MAYBE then we should fix the underlying causes, instead of looking away and letting it grow, becoming a problem for Tomorrow Homer. .. hopefully, ... that won't work.
Maybe those comments remind us that we should lift our lazy asses and fix this rotten world that is broken only because we don't do shit about it!
Maybe we want to ignore that we're ashamed of that too.
Maybe,
Yes of course, at first they started to read all emails in the world in order to block spam messages, now they want to control everything people post over internet. Good job Google! Very nice! My site would never have any Facebook or Google trackers or services. I wrote my own spam filter and it works really fine, so privacy of clients stays intact.
muh conservative beliefs!
Now you can dial in exactly what pleases you.
This will never end... and pretty much no one will see this......
Great, just what we need: MORE silencing of dissenting voices. This time under the cry of 'toxicity.'
Toxic: adjective - any subject, word, phrase, or idea which a person of left-leaning political views disagrees with.
Except when it's leftists poking their noses into (or destroying) right-leaning areas, it's not toxicity, it's 'diversity of thought' and "you need your echo chambers broken up to prevent radicalization!!!"
Now if they'll add a method to hide comments by people responding to partial comments because they filtered out anything that might so much as skew their fragile world-view, us grown-ups can finally have meaningful discussions without having to resort to pussy-footing around the issues.
If you need any more evidence that Alphabet trolls Slashdot, down voting everything that doesn't agree with their company goals, look no further than articles like this one. Everything comment even slightly critical of their new Snowflake mode, will be down-voted nigh instantly.
The problem is with every 10,000 trolls out there is there one spark of genius, with an opposing idea, that is well thought through and should be considered.
While I would like that that idea to be shared to help diversify our frame of thought, there is the other 9,999 trolls, just meant to enrage us, think it is a stupid joke, repeating the same old disprove message, and lie to us enough times where we think it is true.
Sometimes we need negative speech, we need to alert people of a major problem, even if it hurts someone feelings, or goes against the cultural norm. Not all problems can be solved with a careful compromise, sometimes you are right and the greater population is wrong.
However probability is the case is you are in the wrong, and you are just trolling.
I would rather see, increased education in spotting fake news and trolling, learning to ignore or block message. Learning to be conscious of your personal biases, and not jumping onto the bandwagon, just because you bias says this is good, as you go on the sliding scale toward evil.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If you need any more evidence that Alphabet trolls Slashdot, down voting everything that doesn't agree with their company goals, look no further than articles like this one. Everything comment even slightly critical of their new Snowflake mode, will be down-voted nigh instantly.
They should rename the extension "the blue pill". ;)
I hate the idiotic term "snowflake", used to refer to somebody who is supposedly "too sensitive". I refuse to use it, in spite of being extremely conservative and anything but a "SJW". You need to stop using these cancerous words that have been planted by the enemy to destroy any chance of anyone listening to "us".
We need to see things that are censored.. a warning may be a helpful start to help train an algorithm... but we should not offload this.
Still waiting....
Google creates snowflake menu!
So the big fear is that these 'online communities' become echo chambers, that re-enforce ideas. The response of the high minded folks at Google apparently is to make sure you can take your echo chamber with you everywhere you go.
What is a toxic comment anyway. My guess is its any idea Google execs don't agree with.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I don't want to hear any opinions contrary to my own.
Hope for Slashdot comments.
Most people think that the AI can understand the comments & sort them according to meaning, then likelihood to cause offence, because they perceive everything through the lens of personal experience, i.e being human rather than an AI algorithm. They assume that computers think rather than calculate. That's so far off the mark. This AI is an NLP pattern matching algorithm tuned to what its human trainers tell it is offensive. I predict it'll suffer from a complex version of the Scunthorpe problem & turn out to be more of a hindrance than help, i.e. censor inoffensive comments while people find creative ways to cause offence without triggering the censorship. Then there's the philosophical point of censorship. Why do we want to do this? Who is it going to help & how?
Boris Yeltsin.
And who electec Boris Yeltsin?
That's right! Literally the CIA!
They openly bragged about it in a big feature in the Washington Post, years ago.
So dear Americans: BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA!
And it removed the entire comments section
Where the reading material of any person has been automatically filtered by numerous "private companies" (pressured/indirectly controlled by governments, as they already are) to only allow exposure to certain viewpoints.
Of course I am sure that Google considers that to be toxic...
Censorship of any kind is wrong.
Corporatism != Free Market
Noe I look like an American.
Damn, damn touch screens, damn virtual keyboards, damn damn Slashdot mobile interface without preview, damn tiny screens, and damn normal-sized human fingers!
I would, but I've been shadowbanned from moderation. Feh.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I literally seek out and enjoy reading toxic comments, at times.
Read my comment again.
It's about *doing* something.
Like not voting for but working on toppling the ones who back the warfare and "religion" that cause 99% of mental illnesses! (including the psychopaths that head major corporations.)
Wouldn't that render pretty much half of all social media unreadable? The focus on how you can finely tune the threshold is a dead giveaway a little bit tunes it all out.
He's just going to troll conservative people. We should censor him.
Discussing...
socialism as a valid option
climate change
etc
Yep, all toxic stuff I'd rather not see.
I hate the idiotic term "snowflake", used to refer to somebody who is supposedly "too sensitive".
So what does one call someone who is overly sensitive, thin-skinned and prone to triggering? Someone that can't stand under any circumstance to have their beliefs and convictions challenged? Someone who demands cry rooms and safe spaces and cuddle puppies?
one thing they can't be called is "adult." or "well-adjusted."
Apparently you need to refresh the page. Look at all the comments that have already been zeroed. Notice anything?
I'm sure this won't insulate people even FURTHER into their own personalized bubbles of self-confirmatory groupthink.
Hint: in a democracy, sometimes people say shit you disagree with
and
Hint: Sometimes people say things that hurt your feelings. Sometimes deliberately! It's your job as a grownup to ignore them.
-Styopa
... or Blinders.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Jut saw this morning Google changed the search results for r/The_Donald so that the actual site is at the bottom of the page around result five. The top result is wikipedia and the second result is wikipedia with https...no other searches for other reddit boards are effected by this change. It's only for r/The_Donald. In what other search does Google return the wikipedia page twice once for each http and https before returning the actual site being searched for?
"Toxic comments" will be whatever Google doesn't like.
Since I don't filter for score and hide nothing, I don't know why I didn't see the other posts. There's zeroed posts, to be sure. Is there a pattern to the content of them, or am I selecting for bias? How big a cabal would it take to pull that off? I haven't bothered to moderate in an age, but a single user gets at most five moderating opportunities, right? Could half a dozen pull it it off? They'd have to build up the karma to be eligible to moderate. Are people whoring their karma to the highest bidder?
So I find anything politically liberal, SJW, or PC to be highly toxic. So Google: This tool will work just fine for me, huh? I'm sure it won't be biased at all.
Slashdot will become a single player game...
Just use the "Shut Up" extension to block all comments on all pages, and the ImprovedTube extension to block the clickbait youtube side bar on all videos. Minimal lost function for better focus on work tasks.
I hate the idiotic term "snowflake", used to refer to somebody who is supposedly "too sensitive". I refuse to use it, in spite of being extremely conservative and anything but a "SJW". You need to stop using these cancerous words that have been planted by the enemy to destroy any chance of anyone listening to "us".
Just what the fuck would you call sheltered college students who demand free fabric softener?
Then again, maybe you're right.
Snowflake is wrong.
CHILDISH, SHELTERED, IMPUDENT, UNEDUCATED, ARROGANT, THOUGHTLESS, FECKLESS, TENDENTIOUS FUCKING SNOWFLAKE is much more accurate.
You don't need to have a PhD to give your part in making the world better.
This is the fruit of research into Dragonfly for Google?
I laugh at the nouveau edition of PC culture (while not necessarily disagreeing with their ultimate motive/goal) as I have the Jack Thompsons of the past, demonizing the blood of Mortal Kombat and Dunegons&Dragons. And there's plenty of words to choose from. Isn't "SJW" good enough to be derisive of armchair stair-removing crusaders? Or whatever umbrella you'd like to shit on. I suspect snowflake was a runaway co-opting, it simply got scooped up by incidental adjacency, misinterpreted as a pertinent sneer.
Anyone possessing both age and IQ in the double digits sees the obvious lineage from "super special snowflake" - a concept that does admittedly still share some small overlap with the various misuses by various groups against various labels - but egos are pretty independent of faction/politics. That's the gap, the term had more to do with ego than sensitivity. Entertaining the idea that one's stylings and ideas are unique, the illusion that any of us are anything but One More Meatbag, the fantasy of every era: Pretending you don't share the exact same fate as every other soon-to-be-putrid worm shit temporarily walking around.
Ironically, the point of calling someone a super special snowflake was that no one is. You are "unique" as every other UUID in the billion invisible databases we swim in, a piece of data with no "unique" value except to further profit somewhere.
Anyway, I don't particularly care about the word's dilution. There's others I'm more annoyed by. Hell, "literally" is still a flaming bag of poo. And I hope GP wasn't thinking I should care if a word is "too cancerous".
It censors what Google doesn't want you to see. Why does anyone use this disaster of a browser, or anything else Google branded? Are you really that fragile and sheepish?
The generally accepted term is "Mr. President."
head in the sand safe space for snowflakes.
"Fuck it, we've gone full evil" - Google
Can it detect Russian trolls pretending to be racists and their far left counterparts?
Google hired Al Qaeda sympathizers from George Soros's organization to tune the filters. Remember how 4chan turned Microsoft's Tay AI into a Nazi? Google hired Muslim right-wingers to do the same thing for their AI that will be censoring online comments. And they made it a homeland security policy so you are paying for it. And in Europe they made it illegal to disagree with the policy, and Eric Schmidt is a big fan of how they do things in Europe.
Remember: Google Is Not What It Seems
I only post AC, and also run no filters, and most of my posts get deleted recently. This one may too, who knows?
There couldn't possibly be negative effects...
~Any apparent grammatical or typographic errors are caused by defects in your display device.
Why would anyone willingly subject themselves to a heavily censored comment system? More people should check out Dissenter. It's great, and does the exact opposite of this idiotic idea.
The word "toxic" has been co-opted by certain groups as coded language for their anti-cisgender, anti-male, anti-caucasian, anti-democratic agenda. Please stop posting articles like this that misuse that word.
Per the perspectivesapi.com website, "toxic" is:
"What's toxic?
This model was trained by asking people to rate internet comments on a scale from "Very toxic" to "Very healthy" contribution. Toxic is defined as... "a rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable comment that is likely to make you leave a discussion.""
That definition literally states toxicity is according one's emotional sensibilities and reactions thereof. This is exactly how echo chambers are built.
~Any apparent grammatical or typographic errors are caused by defects in your display device.
Thank you for your contribution to Trump's democratic challenger in 2020.
Fuck your feelings.
Anything I don't like is "toxic".
Just let the machine do the thinking, and protect you from other peoples words and ideas.
It might work with people who were accidentally being offensive, but if a trolls wants to annoy you, no AI based system is going to stop them.
I hate the idiotic term "snowflake", used to refer to somebody who is supposedly "too sensitive". I refuse to use it, in spite of being extremely conservative and anything but a "SJW". You need to stop using these cancerous words that have been planted by the enemy to destroy any chance of anyone listening to "us".
I am right leaning- and still think that the best course for the country is to follow a conservative path Democrats will lead us to a road of economic ruin.
However, that said, the Republican party of today makes me cringe, more so the followers of the party than the party itself. It wasn't that long ago that we were the party of common sense and walked the high-road. There are still many of us out there that thinks the party should return to being the party of common-sense. All this silly, repetitive insults are ridiculous; not that many leftist ideals don't deserve mocking, they do! But, c'mon people, use intelligence, be original. All this "snowflake-this", "SJW-that" just makes us looks like a bunch of idiots and drives people away from common sense and voting for us.
Young people are making the mistake and registering Democrat because they read your boorish comments and think "I don't want to be associated with that". The racists and the idiots who go around using terms like "snowflake" and "SJW" should not represent the party. Let's go back to being the party of common sense and intelligence!
There's "oh noes my safe space!" and there's the GNAA and it's Russian equivalent.
I use spam filters to kill junk comments all the time. Why wouldn't I?
Not saying it can't be tricky to get out of a bubble. I'm following Bernie Sander's campaign pretty closely and barely noticed Kamala Harris; though to be fair that's mostly because she's quietly raising funds from mega donors at the moment...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
DNC says illegals killing US citizens need to be protected from prosecution. Reporting illegals who attempt to get firearms illegally shouldn't be reported to authorities (House just voted on this)
Killing live born babies to support abortion should be allowed (Senate DNC voted on this)
Green New Deal says to tax workers at 70% to give money to "those unwilling to work"
However, a US citizen eats a steak or flys on an airplane should be considered a criminal.
Nope, all facts. That is where your DNC stands on issues today. Many DNC candidates for president support the Green New Deal and killing babies.
Even better...
They also support KKK member as VA Gov
and serial rapist as VA Lt. Gov
Feel free to show me DNC members voting to protect live born babies. A few voted to report illegals attempting to get firearms illegally to authorities, but they were told they are not allowed to vote in the future without asking AOC how to vote or she would make sure they lose reelection.
Congratulations on supporting pure trash.
/. does something like this (albeit less sophisticated) with the old "Natalie Portman / Hot Grits / Greased up Yoda Doll" spam posters. If you're one of the older /.ers you probably remember a time when the GNAA (don't google it at work) made the site basically unusable. You're not just dealing with bad actors, you're dealing with bad actors with scripts written by asshats with programming skills.
/. won't let you post (real posters like you and me occasionally run into the filters by mistake).
At some point you have to have automated comments. There's some stuff even
A mod system is all well and good, but if you've got 300 troll comments on a thread with 600 posts more than half your mod points go to fighting the trolls. That means real, substantive comments get lost. Don't think that reality hasn't been lost on the trolls, especially the professional ones.
You don't have to get your message out, you just have to down out the other sides message. That's what happens when the other side doesn't play by the rules.
Now that said there are still outlets for even the worst trolls (Gab, 8chan, etc). If you want to keep tabs on them over there and engage them you can. I've actually considered it but, well, I'll be blunt, I'm scared of them. That community has a history of Doxxing and Violence. And stuff like Swatting is all too easy.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
He's right you know.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
the big fear is that these online communities become basically useless because of abusive troll posts.
A toxic comment isn't too hard to identify, especially for somebody as sophisticated as google. Using racial slurs is a dead giveaway. Also excessive cursing (excessive being relative to the length of the post), common insult words like "idiot" and "stupid", etc. As for how to calculate the thresholds, you have users mod comments then you run the modded comments through one of the many common text algorithms.
Yes, this means that some stuff gets blocked until it's re-written, but if anything that'll probably improve the discourse. If you write a 5 paragraph essay on why something is good or bad and call out one person for being an idiot that can probably slide. If you spend the entire 5 paragraph essay calling everybody involved morons you should probably re-read what you wrote and ask yourself if everybody involved really is actually stupid.
As the saying goes, if you run into an asshole in the morning you just ran into one asshole. If you run into assholes all day every day then you're probably an asshole.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
[this comment has been removed for your safety]
They should rename the extension "the red pill". ;)
Fixed that for ya. I'm assuming you wanted the joke to reflect reality, and not the delusions of children :)
Most of us call those types "conservative" or "alt-right".
If trolling was just the guy trying to first post GNAA, it wouldn't be an issue. The problem is that people want to label all wrongthink as "trolling" and deceive people about what the others actually believe in order to make people modify their beliefs by shifting the Overton window. Make no mistake, it's not about "civility" or anything else--as can be seen from highly selective outrage, or even how they consider the very act of wrongthinking to be uncivil.
The people going on about "trolling" want you to believe that people don't really believe what they actually do believe so that you will label their idea of wrongthink as socially unacceptable thinking and allow them to create a chilling effect to shift the Overton window.
In short, they want to control public opinion by steering the public consensus.
Will always allow its own approved ads.
People publishing their own ideas, thoughts, links, reviews and comments get hidden by an ad brand.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
No, the GOP only claimed to be the party of common sense. They've always been radicals.
Sometimes that works. For Lincoln, for Roosevelt. But Nixon and Reagan and Bush? Nope. Toxic, now moronic with Trump.
You say they're too sensitive (which is not necessarily a negative sentiment), instead of using the emotionally charged term snowflake (clearly negative, implies someone cannot handle the truth)