Twitter's Executive Bemoans Current Machine Learning Limitations

It’s fair to say that Twitter has in many ways ended up becoming the hub in which people have the various conversations that shape opinions on a wide variety of topics at the end of the day. The thing about Twitter is that it has a tendency to be a really toxic place as well, and a big part of the reason why that is the case has to do with the fact that there is a lot of misinformation out there as well as hate speech. Twitter has taken a lot of steps to try and keep itself free of misinformation and hate speech, something that is becoming increasingly important when you take into account the fact that misinformation is at an all time high due to the reason that the current pandemic means that a lot of people don’t really know what is going on and the recent protests and riots in the US have meant that hate speech has become a lot more difficult to manage at the end of the day.

Twitter is trying to use machine learning in order to protect users from these kinds of threats, but CTO Parag Agarwal has discussed the issues that are being faced with this sort of thing. In spite of the fact that Twitter is using machine learning, a lot of misinformation as well as hate speech ends up slipping through the cracks. The reason behind this is that there are still problems that need to be ironed out when it comes to hate speech, and there are four particular problems that Twitter seems to be facing in this regard.

Machine power bots that are trying to manipulate the algorithm are a real source of annoyance and they are one of the problems that are being faced. Sometimes these bots are being used strategically by humans instead of being allowed to run amok. In a lot of situations there are human manipulators who make accounts on the platform in an attempt to subvert the conversation. There are also a number of real accounts out there that end up getting compromised in some way, shape or form.



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