OK, let’s be honest, the Internet is chock full of trolls, miserable souls, and hate speech. There’s no denying that at all, some days are better than others, we get our fair share of hate around here at Techaeris. But is censoring the Internet using algorithms to detect hate speech a good idea? Google’s Eric Schmidt believes that algorithms might be the answer to policing the Internet community and the thoughts (hateful ones anyway) expressed there. To put this in a bit of context, Schmidt was addressing the subject of hate speech and the broader subject of terrorism. Schmidt proposed what he calls “sort of like spell-checkers” that basically scan the whole of the Internet for keywords that may be associated with hateful speech.
“It’s our responsibility to demonstrate that stability and free expression go hand in hand,” he writes. “We should build tools to help de-escalate tensions on social media—sort of like spell-checkers, but for hate and harassment.”
In this new age of global connectivity we’re closer to each other than ever before. Even when I was a kid we didn’t really know what was happening across the ocean even from what we saw on the news. The Internet has dumped news in the raw as it happens in our laps and it has given everyone (good and bad) a platform to speak from. So there’s a lot to consider and unpack when you throw out a proposal to censor the Internet.
What are your thoughts? Does Schmidt make a good point? Should we be censoring the Internet? Let us know in the comments below or on Google+, Facebook and Twitter.
[button link=”http://qz.com/568580/googles-chairman-wants-algorithms-to-censor-the-internet-for-hate-speech/” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: Quartz[/button]Last Updated on November 27, 2018.
