When covering controversial topics or live under autocratic governments, online harassment is a constant challenge. For women, it can range from nuisances like insults and memes targeting their appearance to matters of life-threatening danger. They’ve been targeted before for reporting on stories that upset powerful groups with negative feedback who feel threatened by what you’re doing coverage-wise.
Google’s Jigsaw’s team of experts has made long-standing investments in user experience research, technology, and other initiatives to help women navigate targeted harassment online. Jigsaw unit releases the code for an open-source anti-harassment tool called Harassment Manager. The program enables journalists and other public figures to manage better abusive comments on social media platforms like Twitter with Jigsaw’s Perspective API, which sorts through potentially harmful messages.
Harassment Manager is a tool that helps users identify and document harmful posts, mute or block perpetrators of harassment on social media. It has an advanced filtering and reporting system that automatically sorts messages into queues, so you can address them all at once rather than individually through the platform’s default tools which are often not effective or well-suited for dealing with harassment issues on their own account. The interface provides insights into how much “toxicity” there was in each message while it’s being processed – this helps users decide whether they want certain replies blurred out before reading them.
Harassment Managers helps users keep track of abusive messages and downloads a standalone report containing the evidence. This creates an easy paper trail for their employer or law enforcement if necessary and gives them access to services like those provided by The Thomson Reuters Foundation which will be released soon.
Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.11168.pdf
Github: https://github.com/conversationai/harassment-manager
References:
- https://medium.com/@JigsawTeam/5edcac127872
- https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/8/22966204/google-jigsaw-perspective-ai-twitter-moderation-harassment-manager-journalists
- https://www.perspectiveapi.com/
