On March 15, Google released 'Harassment Manager,' an open-source anti-harassment programme to assist women journalists and activists, particularly those covering contentious themes or living in authoritarian regimes, in dealing with online abuse.
The code for the open-source anti-harassment tool has been shared by Google's Jigsaw subsidiary on the Microsoft-owned open source repository, GitHub.
Users can utilise 'Harassment Manager' to track and handle abuse directed 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.
The endeavour included collaborations with many NGOs in the journalism and human rights space, in addition to the Twitter alliance. The Harassment Manager code is now open-sourced on Github, allowing developers and non-profits to build and customise it 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.
Developers and organisations will be able to modify it to their specific needs and apply the technology to assist additional at-risk populations, according to the business.