On Thursday, Google and Jigsaw, a tech incubator under Google’s parent company, Alphabet, announced Perspective, which uses machine learning to help identify online harrassment. The company looked at hundreds of thousands of online comments and had human users rank how abusive they were.
Perspective then took that information and identified what text was likely to be perceived as “toxic,” or “a rude or unreasonable comment that is likely to make you leave a discussion,” and is now able to rate text to find what is most offensive. Although it is still in early development, the API is available to publishers to try now. And you can test Perspective yourself with its online writing experiment, where you can enter text to “see the potential effect of what you’re writing.”