The artificial intelligence could eventually help social networking sites combat hate speech.

Of late, the issue of hate speech and offensive images on the internet has been a topic of concern for policy makers, internet giants and general public across the world. On one hand, while sharing of information now happens with one touch and one click, it has also unleashed a devil in terms of people sharing offensive images, videos and messages, to disturb or torture others. Offensive posts that violate Facebook's or Twitter's terms of service can include content that is hate speech, threatening or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence. Typically, content has to be seen and assessment of whether it is malicious and inappropriate is done by at least one human, either a user or paid worker. Previously, Twitter and Facebook had relied extensively on outside human contractors from startups, who would sift through the content and assess which content is malicious and inappropriate.

"Content moderation" might sound like a commonplace academic or editorial task, but the reality is far darker. Internationally, there are more than 100,000 people, many in the Philippines but also in the U.S., whose job each day is to scan online content to screen for obscene, hateful, threatening, abusive, or otherwise disgusting content, according to Wired. The toll this work takes on moderators can be likened to post-traumatic stress disorder, leaving emotional and psychological scars that can remain for life if untreated. That's a grim reality seldom publicized in the rush to have everyone engaged online at all times. Twitter, Facebook, Google, Netflix, YouTube, and other companies may not publicize content moderation issues, but that doesn't mean the companies aren't working hard to stop the further harm caused to those who screen visual and written content.

Facebook has long relied on human eyes to monitor the 350 million photos that are uploaded daily. Now, the social media giant is using artificial intelligence to shoulder some of the weight and says the technology has flagged more offensive photos than its human users. Photos deemed offensive include content that is hateful, pornographic or violent and the AI scans every image to determine if they violate Facebook guidelines prior to releasing them on the site. Facebookis using artificial intelligence to shoulder some of the weight and says it has flagged more offensive photos than its human users. Some 350 million photos are upload to Facebook every day.

In a bid to stem hate speech, Facebook has revealed that its Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are spotting more offensive photos than humans on its platform. According to a Tech Crunch report, nearly 25 percent of Facebook engineers now regularly use its internal AI platform to build features and do business but the best use is to check and find offensive photos. "One thing that is interesting is that today we have more offensive photos being reported by AI algorithms than by people. The higher we push that to 100 percent, the fewer offensive photos have actually been seen by a human," Joaquin Candela, Facebook's director of engineering for applied machine learning was quoted as saying. "This AI system helps rank News Feed stories, read aloud the content of photos to the vision impaired and automatically write closed captions for video ads that increase view time by 12 percent," he informed.