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https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/08/online-abuse-artificial-intelligence-human-input

by Inbal Goldberger (VP of Trust and Safety, ActiveFence)

Aug 10, 2022 

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With 63% of the world’s population online, the internet is a mirror of
society: it speaks all languages, contains every opinion and hosts a
wide range of (sometimes unsavoury) individuals.

As the internet has evolved, so has the dark world of online
harms. Trust and safety teams (the teams typically found within online
platforms responsible for removing abusive content and enforcing
platform policies) are challenged by an ever-growing list of abuses,
such as child abuse, extremism, disinformation, hate speech and fraud;
and increasingly advanced actors misusing platforms in unique ways.

The solution, however, is not as simple as hiring another roomful of
content moderators or building yet another block list. Without a
profound familiarity with different types of abuse, an understanding of
hate group verbiage, fluency in terrorist languages and nuanced
comprehension of disinformation campaigns, trust and safety teams can
only scratch the surface.

A more sophisticated approach is required. By uniquely combining the
power of innovative technology, off-platform intelligence collection and
the prowess of subject-matter experts who understand how threat actors
operate, scaled detection of online abuse can reach near-perfect
precision.

* Online abuses are becoming more complex

Since the introduction of the internet, wars have been fought,
recessions have come and gone and new viruses have wreaked havoc. While
the internet played a vital role in how these events were perceived,
other changes – like the radicalization of extreme opinions, the spread
of misinformation and the wide reach of child sexual abuse material
(CSAM) – have been enabled by it.

Online platforms’ attempts to stop these abuses have led to a Roadrunner
meets Wile E. Coyote-like situation, where threat actors use
increasingly sophisticated tactics to avoid evolving detection
mechanisms. This has resulted in the development of new slang, like
child predators referring to “cheese pizza” and other terms involving
the letters c and p instead of “child pornography”. New methodologies
are employed, such as using link shorteners to hide a reference to a
disinformation website; and online abuse tactics, such as the
off-platform coordination of attacks on minorities.

* Traditional methods aren’t enough

The basis of most harmful content detection methods is artificial
intelligence (AI). This powerful technology relies on massive training
sets to quickly identify violative behaviours at scale. Built on data
sets of known online abuses in familiar languages means AI can detect
known abuses in familiar languages, but it is less effective at
detecting nuanced violations in languages it wasn't trained on – a
gaping hole of which threat actors can take advantage.

While providing speed and scale, AI also lacks context: a critical
component of trust and safety work. For example, robust AI models exist
to detect nudity but few can discern whether that nudity is part of a
renaissance painting or a pornographic image. Similarly, most models
can’t decipher whether the knife featured in a video is being used to
promote a butcher’s equipment or a violent attack. This lack of context
may lead to over-moderating, limiting free speech on online platforms;
or under-moderating, which is a risk to user safety.

In contrast to AI, human moderators and subject-matter experts can
detect nuanced online abuse and understand many languages and
cultures. This precision, however, is limited by the analyst’s specific
area of expertise: a human moderator who is an expert in European white
supremacy won’t necessarily be able to recognize harmful content in
India or misinformation narratives in Kenya. This limited focus means
that for human moderators to be effective, they must be part of large,
robust teams – a demanding effort for most technology companies.

The human element should also not be ignored. The thousands of
moderators tasked with keeping abhorrent content offline must witness it
themselves, placing them at high risk of mental illness and traumatic
disorders. Beyond care for moderators, this situation may limit the
operation’s effectiveness, as high churn and staffing instabilities lead
to low organizational stability and inevitable moderation mistakes.

* The "Trust & Safety" intelligent solution to detect online abuse

While AI provides speed and scale and human moderators provide
precision, their combined efforts are still not enough to proactively
detect harm before it reaches platforms. To achieve proactivity, trust
and safety teams must understand that abusive content doesn’t start and
stop on their platforms. Before reaching mainstream platforms, threat
actors congregate in the darkest corners of the web to define new
keywords, share URLs to resources and discuss new dissemination tactics
at length. These secret places where terrorists, hate groups, child
predators and disinformation agents freely communicate can provide a
trove of information for teams seeking to keep their users safe.

The problem is that accessing this information is in no way
scalable. Classic intelligence collection requires deep research,
expertise, access and a fair amount of assimilation skills – human
capacities that cannot be mimicked by a machine.

* Baking in intelligence

We’ve established that the standard process of AI algorithms for scale
and human moderators for precision doesn’t adequately balance scale,
novelty and nuance. We’ve also established that off-platform
intelligence collecting can provide context and nuance, but not scale
and speed.

To overcome the barriers of traditional detection methodologies, we
propose a new framework: rather than relying on AI to detect at scale
and humans to review edge cases, an intelligence-based approach is
crucial.

By bringing human-curated, multi-language, off-platform intelligence
into learning sets, AI will then be able to detect nuanced, novel online
abuses at scale, before they reach mainstream platforms. Supplementing
this smarter automated detection with human expertise to review edge
cases and identify false positives and negatives and then feeding those
findings back into training sets will allow us to create AI with human
intelligence baked in. This more intelligent AI gets more sophisticated
with each moderation decision, eventually allowing near-perfect
detection, at scale.

* The outcome

The lag between the advent of novel abuse tactics and when AI can detect
them is what allows online abuse to proliferate. Incorporating
intelligence into the content moderation process allows teams to
significantly reduce the time between when new online abuse methods are
introduced and when AI can detect them. In this way, trust and safety
teams can stop threats rising online before they reach users.

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0
International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and
not the World Economic Forum.

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-- 
380° (Giovanni Biscuolo public alter ego)

«Noi, incompetenti come siamo,
 non abbiamo alcun titolo per suggerire alcunché»

Disinformation flourishes because many people care deeply about injustice
but very few check the facts.  Ask me about <https://stallmansupport.org>.

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