UK Parliament / Open data

Online Abuse

Proceeding contribution from Margot James (Conservative) in the House of Commons on Monday, 29 April 2019. It occurred during e-petition debate on Online Abuse.

That is an excellent suggestion. I am happy to put that to my hon. Friend the Minister for Sport, and if the hon. Lady and the hon. Member for Warrington North, who chairs the Petitions Committee, would like to attend that meeting, we will set that up. Yes, we will definitely invite all football authorities to that meeting.

The hon. Member for Warrington North also talked about the effect on moderators. Thousands of people are now employed by tech companies to moderate content and make decisions on whether it crosses the threshold and should be taken down. We are looking more and more to systems of artificial intelligence to do as much of that job as possible, precisely for the reasons she set out. It is a horrendous job to do, and I imagine that over time it ends up affecting the moderators’ mental health. On a positive note, 75% of the 4 million videos that YouTube has taken down in, I think, the past six months were identified and removed via artificial intelligence. That does offer us some hope for the future.

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
659 c20WH 
Session
2017-19
Chamber / Committee
Westminster Hall
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