Project Harmony: Salience

Description

Join the Project Harmony Team

The Internet is rife with hate and bullying, and the long-term ill effects of this behavior has become a hot topic in the public arena. Aside from creating psychological malaise, hostility can even affect our physical health, causing depression, anxiety, even heart disease and cancer. It may seem too big a problem for any one person to tackle, but we have created a way for everyday Internet users to help us in our mission to increase awareness of hate-speech, and thereby combat it: Project Harmony.

The Science

Project Harmony is a new suite of tools in development that seeks to improve the tenor of online communications. How? Simply put, it increases our awareness of harmful language patterns. When visiting various social media websites (currently Facebook, YouTube, Google+, and twitter) content from posts and comments are scored by a comparison to our data set. When a certain post crosses a threshold of similarity to our data its color is changed making it more salient.

Project Harmony works because at the heart of the code is a 'statistical model' built from a growing codex of bullying statements. Harmony checks each block of text and gives it a score - too high of a score, and Harmony flags that bit of text. Project Harmony is pretty clever, but still not completely accurate. We invite you to suggest text that should not have been highlighted by providing this icon: Click it once if the highlighted text is actually ‘cool’ after all.

Based upon latest social learning theories, Salience is a tool designed to develop within you both motivation to critically examine their communications and the communications of those around them as well as understanding of how language is used, at times subconsciously, to manipulate others through fear and hate. This is achieved by drawing attention to text which is similar in structure to our collection of hateful manipulative statements.

The Software

Salience, our Google Chrome extension, is open to anyone with an interest in making the internet safer while recognizing the real threats to human rights posed by hate speech in its many forms. Right now, all you really need is to be using Google Chrome and to install our extension, then you can contribute simply by visiting pages on Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ where bullying comments are occurring.

Bully for You, our Android app available in play, lets you contribute to our understanding of what bullying is to you. It takes a selection of content from Salience and asks: is this bully for you?

As Project Harmony progresses, new upgrades will be scheduled and released and will include many more features and increased functionality. We will be adding: