The future is here: the robots vs. the trolls

By artappraiser on Sun, 07/02/2017 - 3:50am |

Keeping The Times Civil, 16 Million Comments and Counting

By Kat Long @ NYTimes.com, July 1

[.....] Since late 2007, when The Times first opened comments on stories, moderators on the community desk have reviewed 16 million of them, with a current rate of about 12,000 daily, said Bassey Etim, who has been the community editor since 2014.

Every day, Mr. Etim, who oversees 12 moderators, and Marcia Loughran, the deputy community manager, decide on which articles comments should be enabled.[....]

The team now has some help from artificial intelligence, however: Last month, The Times started a new commenting platform that uses machine-learning technology to group similar comments, allowing human moderators to approve or reject them more efficiently. The system allows moderators to open 80 percent of articles to comments, up from 10 percent [....]

URL:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/insider/times-comments.html