Twitter's live video streaming service Periscope is testing a feature that allows a randomly selected jury of viewers to decide whether commenters reported for abuse should be barred from live broadcasts.
While online harassment and abuse have long been known issues for users of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, these practices are particularly prominent on Periscope, whereby live, chat-style streams of comments are overlaid onto the live video broadcast - sometimes over the broadcaster's face, for example.
Periscope's jury feature allows viewers to report comments as abuse or spam (the person who reports a comment will cease to see the commenter's messages for the remainder of the broadcast), at which point a randomly selected jury of five viewers will be asked to vote on whether they agree, disagree, or are unsure about the report.
If the jury finds the offender guilty, they will be unable to comment for one minute. If they post a second abusive comment, they will be barred from commenting for the remainder of the broadcast.
In its online announcement of the feature, Periscope stresses the importance of the system being both instantaneous and "community-led". "People in a broadcast are best suited to determine what's okay and what's not," says Periscope's announcement. "Context matters - ?for example, a comment that might be okay in a comedy broadcast might not be okay somewhere else," it explains.
Evaluating complaints via a randomly selected jury may also hamper cyber bullying by users who band together to support certain abusers, and discriminatory bias by social network moderators, who have been known to make questionable decisions regarding which content is permitted and which is not.
Yet the jury feature works in tandem with existing reporting tools, says Periscope, reminding users that they can still report ongoing harassment or abuse, remove or block certain users from their broadcasts, and restrict commenting privileges to users the broadcaster is following.
Users can also opt out of enabling the new moderation feature on their broadcasts altogether, as well as choose, via their settings, not to be included in the pool of users selected for jury on broadcasts they are watching.
Share