Pages

Tuesday 8 December 2015

Spell-check for hate

The BBC reports

Technology companies should work on tools to disrupt terrorism - such as creating a hate speech "spell-checker" - Google's chairman Eric Schmidt has said.

Hardly a surprise, these things evolve in small steps. The form they eventually take is a matter of conjecture, but not particularly difficult conjecture. Terrorists today, grumpy old cynics tomorrow. If you have anything to say then say it now seems to be the message.

5 comments:

Sam Vega said...

From the article:

He insisted that censorship and invasions of privacy would not solve the situation.
"We should build tools to help de-escalate tensions on social media - sort of like spell-checkers, but for hate and harassment. We should target social accounts for terrorist groups like the Islamic State, and remove videos before they spread"


So we shouldn't censor people, but we should remove videos before they spread. Brilliant. As double-speak is so well entrenched, why not have a "hate-checker"?

A K Haart said...

Sam - or an "offence-checker" or "annoyance-checker".

Jenny Woolf said...

Or possibly a doublespeak checker, although I think that would be harder in more ways than one.

Demetrius said...

If any nasty men (or women) had half a brain, they would not leave anything in their communications to be detected.

A K Haart said...

Jenny - yes, there are so many subtleties that it doesn't sound feasible.

Demetrius - they would probably make their meaning clear but ambiguous.