Alphabet Inc's Google and subsidiary Jigsaw launched on 23
rd Feb 2017 a new technology to help news organisations and online platforms identify abusive comments on their websites.
The technology, called Perspective, will review comments and score them based on how similar they are to comments people said were toxic or likely to make them leave a conversation.
The tool has been tested on New York Times and the companies hope to extend it to other news organisations such as The Guardian and The Economist as well as websites.
Perspective examined hundreds of thousands of comments that had been labelled as offensive by human reviewers to learn how to spot potentially abusive language.
The company was open to rolling out the technology to all platforms, including larger ones such as Facebook and Twitter where trolling can be a major headache.
The technology could in the future be expanded to trying to identify personal attacks or off-topic comments too.
Perspective will not decide what to do with comments it finds are potentially abusive; rather publishers will be able to flag them to their moderators or develop tools to help commenters understand the impact of what they are writing.
The initiative against trolls follows efforts by Google and Facebook to combat fake news stories in France, Germany and the United States after they came under fire during the US presidential vote.
The debate surrounding fake news has led to calls from politicians for social networks to be held more liable for the content posted on their platforms.
Jigsaw: Know More- Formerly called: Google Ideas (2010–2015)
- Type: Think tank
- Founded: 2010
- Founders: Eric Schmidt
- Headquarters: New York City, United States
- Jared Cohen (President)
- Parent : Google (2010–2015)/Alphabet Inc. (2015–present)
- Website: jigsaw.google.com
