Jigsaw was named after its focus on physical results, if you were wondering. No relation to that serial killer from the ‘Saw’ franchise.
How It Works
Social media, and Twitter in particular, has a problem with online harassment. Users join together on the basis of a shared interest and then brigade individuals over perceived disses. Earlier this year, Reddit tweaked its user blocking rules in an attempt to contain harassment. Periscope took similar measures early in June of this year. The patterns of abuse are easy to point out, and AI has been developed as a potential solution in many cases. Even by Google itself. Jigsaw’s Conversation AI relies on machine learning, a process in which the AI uses a series of examples to learn what abuse looks like, rather than relying on a pre-programmed matrix. Does it work? From Wired: The algorithm focuses on just individual strings of text right now, but the team hopes it can eventually process long-term patterns across entire social media profiles. On the less optimistic side, some have raised concerns about the false-positive rate. Still, it can’t be worse than letting internet trolls go unstopped.
