Troll Hunters

A little-known department at Alphabet has a strategy that might just save social media.

- Jeff John Roberts

TECH

HAVE YOU E VER BEEN AT TACKED by trolls on social media? I have. In December a mocking tweet from white supremacist David Duke led his supporters to turn my Twitter account into an unholy sewer of Nazi ravings and disturbing personal abuse. It went on for days.

We’re losing the Internet war with the trolls. Faced with a torrent of hate and abuse, people are giving up on social media, and websites are removing comment features. Who wants to be part of an online community ruled by creeps and crazies?

Fortunately, this pessimism may be premature. A new strategy promises to tame the trolls and reinvigorate civil discussion on the Internet. Hatched by Jigsaw, an in-house think tank at Google’s parent company, Alphabet, the tool relies on artificial intelligence and could solve the once-impossible task of vetting floods of online comments.

To explain what Jigsaw is up against, chief research scientist Lucas Dixon compares the troll problem to so-called denial-of-service attacks in which attackers flood a website with garbage traffic in order to knock it off-line.

“Instead of flooding your website with traffic, it’s flooding the comment section or your social media or hashtag so that no one else can have a word, and basically control the conversation,” says Dixon.