Fighting Social Media Hate Speech With AI-Powered Bots

Could AI-powered bots fight hate speech by flooding the internet with love? As social media platforms have become ever more intrinsic to how we live our lives and begun to evolve into the primary medium through which we communicate and listen to the rest of the world, their rise has handed a megaphone to the world's hate and vitriol. In fact, it was Twitter who initially stepped forward to staunchly defend the rights of terrorists and their sympathizers to communicate via its platform before abruptly reversing itself in the face of fierce public criticism. Yet, despite myriad programs and policies designed on paper to fight abuse, in reality the platforms have done very little to curb the spread of hate speech, harassment and violent threats. This raises the question of whether the rise of deep learning-powered "bots" could offer a powerful solution to online hate speech, by deploying them en masse to report, counter and overwhelm hateful posts in realtime. Over the last few years deep learning algorithms have made enormous advances in their ability to process human text and imagery at levels of sophistication and accuracy that approach human levels at times, while even simple ELIZA bots have managed to carry on fairly convincing chats for more than half a century.