Alphabet Inc’s Google and subsidiary Jigsaw on Thursday launched 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.
It has been tested on the 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.
“News organisations want to encourage engagement and discussion around their content, but find that sorting through millions of comments to find those that are trolling or abusive takes a lot of money, labour, and time.
“As a result, many sites have shut down comments altogether,” Jared Cohen, President of Jigsaw, which is part of Alphabet, wrote in a blog post.
“But they tell us that isn’t the solution they want. We think technology can help.”
Perspective examined hundreds of thousands of comments that had been labelled as offensive by human reviewers to learn how to spot potentially abusive language.
CJ Adams, Jigsaw Product Manager, said 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.