International Women's Day: Google launches anti-harassment filter to help women journalists

Google on Tuesday launched an open source anti-harassment tool called 'Harassment Manager' to help women journalists and activists, especially those covering controversial topics or living under autocratic governments, manage online abuse.

Google's Jigsaw unit has released the code for the open source anti-harassment tool on Microsoft-owned open source repository GitHub.

'Harassment Manager' allows users to document and manage abuse targeted at them on social media, starting with Twitter.

"It helps users easily identify and document harmful posts, mute or block perpetrators of harassment and hide harassing replies to their own tweets. Individuals can review tweets based on hashtag, username, keyword or date, and leverage our Perspective API to detect comments that are most likely to be toxic," Jigsaw said in a post.

In addition to the partnership with Twitter, the effort also involved collaborations with several NGOs in the journalism and human rights space.

The Harassment Manager code is now available on Github, open sourced for developers and non-governmental organisations to build and adapt for free.

"Our hope is that this technology provides a resource for people who are facing harassment online, especially female journalists, activists, politicians and other public figures, who deal with disproportionately high toxicity online," Jigsaw noted.

The company also looks forward to seeing developers and organisations tailor it to their specific needs and use the technology to help other at-risk populations.