Academics Develop Plot to Scan Social Media, Flag Posts with “pre-crime” Machine Learning

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Didi Rankovic

Researchers from four US universities are floating the idea of employing machine learning (ML) in a pre-crime style in order to go through Instagram conversations and flag those the algorithms will be programmed to consider as “risky.”

This is justified as a good way to protect young social media users from harassment and bullying, and advertised as a good balance between invading user privacy and “protecting” them by directly spying on their content.

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