Human Rights Group Deploys An 'Empathy Test' Captcha System To Help Sites Fend Off Trolls

from the because-i-love-being-talked-down-to-by-a-dialog-box dept

Fact: if you have a site with any amount of traffic and open comment threads, you're going to draw trolls. There's no method that's been proven to completely rid your site of trolls, though not for a lack of trying. (This one is particularly mischevious.) Various sites have tried anything from aggressive moderation to requiring Facebook logins... all to no avail. (Although the latter method has proven that certain people are more than willing to troll without the protection of anonymity.)

A new anti-troll tool from a rather unlikely source has just been unveiled, one that hopes to combine the "fun" of solving captchas with something akin to a "blush response:"

A human rights group is introducing a new take on CAPTCHAs, those little boxes that make you type in a word to prove you are human before you can comment or register for a site. Their version doesn’t just present a scrambled word to be deciphered, but instead forces a person to choose the right word to unscramble based on the proper emotional response to a human rights violation.

Civil Rights Defenders, the Swedish-based group that developed the tool, hopes the Civil Rights Captcha will help sites block spiders and bots, while letting humans in — and hopefully educating the humans at the same time...

But perhaps forcing a troll to repeatedly choose an empathetic response will, over time, soothe the ravages of comment sections around the net. Okay, that might also be asking too much, but at the very least spreading information about human rights abuses certainly can’t hurt, even if the jerks of the internet (see, for example, YouTube comments) remain beyond help.

That's right. It's Voight-Kampff for comment threads. Instead of trying to parse a set of badly scanned words and Street View cam house numbers, Civil Rights CAPTCHA instead asks you how you feel about certain horrific situations, hoping that you'll make the "right" decision before spewing your vitriol and ignorance into the now-unlocked comment box.

While its heart is certainly in the right place, the implementation still requires captchas, something most users would rather not encounter every time they make a comment. (Yes, I know. But sometimes, decent , non-trolling humans don't want to "create an account" or "enter an email address" in order to participate.) On top of that is the fact that each captcha has only one "right" answer, making the system more than a little heavy-handed in its moralizing. This assumes that your regular, non-troll commenters are going to be fine with being preached at while jumping through hoops. It also assumes that all dedicated trolls are morons incapable of deducing the (obviously) "right" reaction to each situation presented.

This particular captcha service might prove useful in limited situations, like being pre-loaded with questions related to a particular cause or event being discussed/promoted at the website deploying it. It also might prove popular with the sort of people who are willing to annoy a certain percentage of their community in order to "raise awareness." It will become a form of penance for those involved, much like forwarding "concerned" emails and switching Facebook statuses to show support. You know, the sort of thing that will morph into "I solved Captchas for world peace. What will YOU do?" t-shirts popping up on Cafepress.

I can't see this solving the troll problem, but I can see it annoying most of a user base, leaving the site deploying it with a smaller audience consisting of people who like being moralized at frequently. Like any other captcha, the spambots and trolls will find a way around it, with the only ones affected being decent human beings, which would seem to be the sort of "demographic" you'd want to annoy less. Pushing them through a "think our way or hit the road" filtering system doesn't make trolls any less prevalent or make non-decent human beings any more "decent."

Filed Under: captcha, empathy, trolls

Rethinking Bullying: Kids Don't See It As Bullying

from the talking-past-one-another dept

For years we've talked about all the silly overreactions to things like the concept of "cyberbullying." In almost every case, it seems like it's just parents simply being incredibly overprotective concerning kids disagreeing with each other -- and the "solutions" they always seem to pose either seemed so off-base as to be ridicule-worthy, or so heavy-handed as to be worrisome for other reasons. As an example of the former, we had a post years back, about a self-described "cyberbullying expert" who claimed that kids would listen to her message about how cyberbullying was bad because she had some guy in a Spiderman costume telling them about it. And, for the latter, we've got all the ridiculous attempts to criminalize being a jerk online, such as in response to the whole Lori Drew incident.

Danah Boyd, who actually studies social interactions online among young people, recently put up a fascinating post about how kids and adults seem to totally talk past each other on these issues, in large part, because kids don't think of these things as "bullying."

When I first started interviewing teenagers about bullying, they would dismiss my questions. "Bullying is so middle/elementary school," they'd say. "There's no bullying problem at my school," they'd say. And then, as our interview would continue, I'd hear about all sorts of interactions that sounded like bullying. I quickly realized that we were speaking different languages. They'd be talking about "starting drama" or "getting into fights" or "getting into my business" or "being mean." They didn't see rumors or gossip as bullying, regardless of whether or not it happened online. And girls didn't see fighting over boys or ostracizing one another because of boys as bullying. They didn't even see producing fight videos as bullying.

So then I started asking them what bullying was. What I learned was that bullying was when someone picked on someone or physically hurt someone who didn't deserve it. I'd ask how they knew if someone deserved it and the response was incredulous, "oh, you know." So I pushed harder... "what if you don't know?" I asked. I got blank stares so I took a different tactic. "What if someone's messing with someone and that other person thinks they're being mean?" This got their attention, but not in the way that I expected. Most told me that you know when someone is messing with you and that if you don't, you're stupid. Besides, when someone's messing with you, you can't take it seriously.

The real issue, Boyd suggests, is not that "bullying," is a problem. It's a lack of empathy. And, of course, that goes way beyond kids. As she notes, "just ask any marital therapist who's trying to help a couple work through their relationship." From there, she points out that these interactions really aren't all that different from adult interactions:

When I look at how teens hurt each other, I can't help but also see how they're developing training wheels for future relationships and reflecting normative behaviors that they see around them. I hear teens' dramas reflected in their stories about how their parents fight -- with each other, with their friends and family and colleagues, and with them. What teens are doing is more coarse, more direct, and more explicit. But they're witnessing adult dramas all around them and what they tend to see isn't pretty. Parents talking smack about work colleagues or bosses. Parents fighting with each other or ostracizing their family members over disagreements.

Boyd isn't quite sure how to deal with this, but is right that this appears to be a much more productive way of looking at the "issue." In thinking about this, it seems like rather than trying to do the impossible and "stopping" people from acting like jerks, a potentially more effective way of dealing with this is trying (if at all possible) to use those kinds of interactions as learning experiences.

There's a great quote, apparently by Ian Percy that "we judge others by their behavior, while we judge ourselves by our intentions." It's really accurate, and highlights the difficulty of having empathy in such situations. People never think that they are in the wrong -- and since they can't readily understand or know the thought process and intentions of others, it often leads to them thinking the worst. If there were better ways to get people to at least recognize that others might also have good intentions, it could at least limit the negative impact of some interactions. Such fights and misunderstandings will never go away. It's probably wishful thinking to even imagine they can be decreased even slightly. But calling them "cyberbullying" and outlawing jerky behavior or doing silly costumed song-and-dances isn't going to help matters at all.

Filed Under: bullying, empathy