Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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!!!"
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.
Outrage is big business on YouTube, they will never ban that. People like Carl Benjamin have popular weekly shows that are nothing but outrage. One single tweet expressing mild concern at a trailer spawned nearly 100 outrage videos, and that's pretty normal.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Still waiting....
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
Hope for Slashdot comments.
Of course I am sure that Google considers that to be toxic...
Censorship of any kind is wrong.
Corporatism != Free Market
I would, but I've been shadowbanned from moderation. Feh.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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.
Apparently you need to refresh the page. Look at all the comments that have already been zeroed. Notice anything?
And what part of that requires reading their online comments?
People should be allowed to lobotomize themselves, so long as there is always an off switch somewhere for the rest of us.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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...
"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?
This is the fruit of research into Dragonfly for Google?
Outrage is big business on YouTube, they will never ban that.
I wondered who would mention YouTube first. They could probably do a better job of blocking toxic comments by just shutting them off on YouTube entirely...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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".
Feature Request: an inverse mode
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
There couldn't possibly be negative effects...
~Any apparent grammatical or typographic errors are caused by defects in your display device.
Outrage is popular in normal news media as well. How quick you forget Covington and Smollett getting major coverage. Terry Crews had to apologize for saying fathers are important on the View.
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.
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.
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/
/. 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/
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"