“ARE YOU SURE ABOUT THAT??”
Slowing down hate on the internet
Sites like Twitter and Facebook are a wondrous thing and connect us instantaneously with each other in an unprecedented way. These sites can also be cesspools of human emotional filth, full of bullying and sharply personal attacks on people that an assailant barely knows.
These two sites have been up for about a decade now (Facebook est.2004, Twitter est.2006). With astronomical membership numbers for each (300M+ for Twitter and 1.44B+(!) for Facebook, these sites are a data-gatherer’s dream come true and have seen much in the realm of good, bad, and straight-up ugly in between us humans.
We’ve reached a point where we should be able to introduce a kind of moderation tool to curb cyber-bullying that can help change online conversations for the better. With a shit-ton of data to work with, there surely must be machine learning algorithms that exist to detect whether someone is about to post something harmful. It is by no means a censorship tool. It is simply a pop-up to slow down a user from posting something they may regret later:
All it’s saying is “Whoaaaa there, are you sure about that? Maybe wanna think that through?” The user can still go ahead if he or she is still feeling the rage, but that pause may just be enough to get someone to take a deep breath, reflect for a split-second, before launching something inflammatory into cyberspace in permanence, because we all know that nothing’s ever deleted permanently. Not on the Internet, anyway.
If the user decides to continue, the site could have another dialogue box asking why they would do such a thing (again, slowing the user down). There could be two options:
- I don’t care
- This isn’t hurtful/ignorant/sexist/racist, etc
Option two would ask for an explanation, which could also help the machine learning algorithm.
This will not eradicate hate from the internet by any means, but it just might slow it down long enough to make a bit of a difference. Maybe this means one less hateful word grenade on the internet. And if this is enough to discourage impatient hate-mongerers to the point where they stop using the site, then that’s one less shit-head online. And who knows…
