We tested Google's new harassment tool on hateful right-wing comments
In today’s harsh political climate, there's no shortage of abuse and trolls -- which is why it's great that Google released a new tool to combat hateful speech on the internet.
It's called Perspective, and the New York Times and other publications will use the algorithm to comb through comments to search for harassment and insults.
It rates messages on a scale from "very healthy" to "very toxic" so that they can be automatically removed or sent to human moderators.
We took the tool on a test drive with some of the far-right's most offensive comments.
The tool is certainly a work in progress. It doesn't pick up some subtle phrases that are abusive and hateful without using profanity.
For example, while thoroughly disgraced alt-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos' comment about women scores as highly toxic, his Black Lives Matter remark doesn't register as that abusive. Looks like Google could use some help with its algorithm.
Additional reporting by Marcus Gilmer.
Topics Google
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
