A web app to tell how abusive you are on Twitter

An Intel intern, Alexei Bastidas has developed a web app, currently in testing, that tells people just how harassing they are on Twitter, offering both a numerical rating as well as example tweets that could be seen as harassing, reports Recode.

Intel had started a project name Hack Harassment that aims to find solutions for different forms of online harassment and the app is a first technological component to emerge from it.

Although the aim of the service is to identify harassing speech, Bastidas said he trained the algorithm using a wide range of Internet content from the darkest parts of Reddit to mainstream news websites like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, as well as Twitter itself.

“We’ve joked around that we’re trying to give our algorithm a liberal arts education,” Bastidas said. The goal is to release the tool publicly (as well as the source code behind it) over the next couple of months.

The move comes as Twitter itself is under fire for not doing enough to prevent harassment and a growing number of publishers including NPR have eliminated their comments section. Just last week, the micro-blogging site rolled out a new “Quality Filter” feature that enables users to filter notifications so that they only see “quality tweets” and mentions from people they follow and hides the abusive ones.

Speaking to Recode, Intel senior VP Doug Fisher said, “I think technology is where this is happening and technology has a role to play to figure out ways to help in all this.”