Google provides a tool to forums and the like to combat trolls

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ThinkBroadband forum

ThinkBroadband Forum – an example of a forum where content moderation can be simplified using Google Perspective

Google’s new innovative technology aims to combat online trolls | Android Authority

My Comments

Previously, I wrote an article regarding the Internet troll problem faced by people who have an Internet presence on a social network, forum, chat-room or similar environment. It is where they face toxic comments and online harassment on these boards from miscreants who use their presence there to make trouble.

A small business’s Facebook page – Google Perspective can make the management of these pages simple when it comes to visitor comments left on these pages

This is made worse for those of us who operate a corporate Internet presence on these environments for their business or other organisation or moderate a forum, blog or similar online presence. In some cases, it has caused some of us not to run these forums at all or turn off commenting ability for the blogs or other online content we publish.

But Google has come to the fore by developing software that allows moderators and users to gain better control over toxic Internet comments. This is based on a human-driven review cycle for comments such as end-users reporting or moderators disallowing comments discovered to be toxic. The Google Perspective software described here learns from the identified troublesome comments in order to determine what happens with new comments.

It is being offered as a set of application-programming-interface “hooks” that can be integrated with content-management systems, social networks and the like. But who knows how long it would take for the APIs that support this functionality to be offered simply as “wrapper” plugins for the popular extensible content-management or forum-management platforms. Similarly, an “outboard” comment-host like Livefyre or Disqus could benefit through offering the Google Perspective technology as a feature to help moderators with manage incoming contents.

They promoted the ability for a moderator to use Perspective to conditionally manage comments that are to be held for moderation or to red-flag potential “flame-wars” and miscreants. But they also put forward the idea for users to filter or sort comments by toxicity which can be of use for most of us who simply don’t want to waste time reading that junk.

What I see of this is that the Google Perspective comment-management software is something that could make it easy for those of us involved in the Internet conversation to make it easy to dodge the troublemakers.

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