Comment sections! Have you ever come across some of those websites with terrible, poisonous comment sections?
YouTube is one of those! It’s like some commenters have made it their life mission to respond with hatred, making the comment sections unbearable!
But what should we, as readers and content producers, do in response to comment sections? Simply ignore them? Strict moderation maybe? In fact, because of these toxic comment sections, many major news organization, decided to completely remove their comment sections. (Read more on Bigthink.com and PopularScience.com)
The Good News?
There is a bot that can identify ‘Toxic’ comments online. According to the New York Times, Jigsaw, a technology incubator within Alphabet (Google’s parent company) says it has “developed a new tool for web publishers to identify toxic comments that can undermine a civil exchange of ideas.” Jigsaw’s software API is known as Perspective. Jigsaw and Google’s Counter Abuse Technology team created Perspective in a collaborative research project called Conversation-AI
Want to know how it works? Fortunately, you test it out for yourself, with an experiment section on the Perspective website, where you can type in words and see if they might be perceived as “toxic.” Check out more on Perspectiveapi.com
