Google Jigsaw has announced a tool dedicated to International Women's Day to prevent abusive messages on social media.
Jigsaw LLC, formerly Google Ideas, is an organization that tries to implement technological solutions such as online censorship and cyber control. Now, the company is releasing the code for an open source harassment prevention tool called Harassment Manager.
The tool's purpose will be to rank potentially abusive comments on social media platforms by journalists and other public figures, especially Twitter. The company uses Jigsaw's Perspective API for this.
Google brings harassment filter to social media
Released as source code for developers to develop, the tool was released in June as a functional app for Thomson Reuters Foundation journalists. Harassment Manager offers moderation options such as hiding tweet replies that contain insults, threats or profanity, muting and blocking responders. These controls, combined with the bulk filtering and reporting system, are now operable in Twitter's API.
Jigsaw Perspective checks messages containing threats, insults and profanity for levels of "toxicity". While Twitter's default moderation tools check these messages one by one, Perspective does this in bulk and lists toxic messages. It also has features such as blurring messages not to be read, searching with keywords.
Harassment Manager also allows users to download a standalone report listing malicious messages. In this way, it will create a paper trail for law enforcement in case of messages with illegal content such as direct threats. However, there is no downloadable app for this tool yet.
Jigsaw announced Harassment Manager on International Women's Day and hopes the tool will provide a useful service, especially for female journalists facing gender-based harassment. They aim to prevent women journalists, activists, politicians, and any public person who receives disproportionately abusive messages online from receiving these malicious messages.
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