Alphabet is helping The New York Times automatically flag offensive comments
Late last month, The New York Times announced that it was doing away with its public editor position, a sort of ombudsman for the paper, in part because the role had been filled by reader comments on the internet. The Times, publisher Arthur Sulzberger wrote in a memo, would be opening its comment sections on a greater number of stories and partnering with Google to manage them. It would be “a sea change in our ability to serve our readers, to hear from them, and to respond to them,” Sulzberger wrote. Today, the Times is unveiling the results of that partnership: an in-house process for automating comment moderation called Moderator.
Until recently, moderators…
