Tackling trolls with a little help from your friends. A 鈥渇riendsourcing鈥� tool called lets people use their friendship group to filter abusive messages sent to them by online trolls.
If someone is being targeted with abuse, Squadbox allows friends, support groups or other trusted parties to access their email account to act as personal moderators. Known contacts can also be whitelisted so their emails go straight through without moderation, or a specific email address can be blacklisted if the harassment comes from a single source.
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Squadbox works best for bursts of harassment rather than a sustained, constant campaign, says Amy Zhang, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the creators of the service. This is because amateur moderators could be overwhelmed by the vitriol in the messages, or the sheer volume of messages could lead to prolonged delays in email delivery.
Before developing Squadbox, Zhang and her colleagues spoke to 16 victims of online harassment to find out what tools would help them battle back against trolls. They found that many people already turned to friends for help moderating messages, as the flood of harassment prevents them from easily using their account without having to filter through each email.
Squadbox comes with privacy tradeoffs as your friends have to read some of your messages, says Liam McLoughlin at the University of Salford . But it has a 鈥減lace in combating abuse鈥� by offering a personalised approach to moderation, he says.
So far, Squadbox聽is only available for email, but the team want to extend it to direct messaging on social media, with Twitter and Facebook frequently under fire for failing to battle online bullying. The team will present the work at the conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Montreal, Canada in April.
Read more:聽We can stop hacking and trolls, but it would ruin the internet
