Weeding Out Online Bullying Is Tough, So Let Machines Do It

Social networks teem with harassment and trolling, so much so that companies have outsourced the work of content moderation to an army of laborers, typically overseas, often at an enormous mental and emotional toll to the workers themselves. But what if you didn't need humans to identify when online abuse was happening? If a computer was smart enough to spot cyberbullying as it happened, maybe it could be halted faster, without the emotional and financial costs that come with humans doing the job. At SRI International, the Silicon Valley incubator where Apple's Siri digital assistant was born, researchers believe they've developed algorithms that come close to doing just that. "Social networks are overwhelmed with these kinds of problems, and human curators can't manage the load," says Norman Winarsky, president of SRI Ventures.