Preamble Content Compass is a free Google Chrome Extension that you can use for Filtering Hateful and Offensive content on Social Media platforms like Twitter, Reddit and YouTube. It typically blurs-out comments that contain Hate speech, Islamophobia and more.
The de-centralized nature of the World Wide Web makes it an ideal place of professionals and amateurs alike to create and share ideas & opinions in various forms like text, audio, video and more. Its perhaps due to its highly democratic nature that the Internet is also populated with websites which use hate speech, racist slurs etc. to spread disinformation and incite hatred against particular ethnic, religious, racial or sexually oriented groups like women. Social media channels are loaded with bigotry and revulsion against Muslims, Jews, African-Americans etc.
Most of the major Social Media platforms like Twitter and Facebook do have their own policies and protocols to combat this menace. But these companies have their own biases and business / political compulsions due to which the policies are inconsistently applied and are often totally ineffective.
This is where Preamble Content Compass can try to make a difference. It detects the following types / categories of Content and blurs it out.
Hate and Harassment:
Cyberbullying: Content that involves an intentional act of harassment towards a victim.
Islamophobia: Content that exhibits hatred, prejudice or bigotry against Islam and its followers (Muslims)
Offensive slurs: Content that includes racial slurs or any insulting terms that denigrate a person, tribe community, nation etc.
General:
Gender Bias: Content that displays any negativity or dislike towards a certain gender or elevate one gender over the other.
In addition to the above, Preamble Content Compass also helps in Promotion of good Journalistic Content as follows:
Well-researched statements: Promotion of Tweets / Posts etc that appear to be amply researched.
Statements of Fact: Content that seems evidence-based and more like to be factual based on it’s style of writing
How it Works:
1. Download and Install the Chrome Extension from the link provided at the end of this article.
2. No further settings are required. The Extension will automatically blur out Hate speech, Offensive content and more from social media platforms such as Twitter, Reddit, YouTube (comments) etc. Hovering your mouse over the blurred-out content makes it visible once again.
3. You can click on the icon at the top right (see screenshot below) to configure the settings pertaining to the content that you want to Blur out / Promote.
Downside:
- Content that is not at all objectionable by any standards and does not fit into any of the Categories discussed above, is also blurred out at times.
- On the other hand, Content that is derogatory and can be classified as Hate speech, is not blurred out many times.
Final Words:
Preamble Content Compass is an Extension that you can use to blur-our content that contains Offensive and Hate speech. After testing, I found that there are quite a few breaches in the detection of the Hate content due to which it is unable to blur-out all the content that can be classified as hateful and offensive. The developers would do good to improvise their algorithms and deploy better detection mechanisms to be more effective in combating this menace.
Click here to download this Extension.
