frenly™ - Building a friendlier web community
Keywords: Internet Toxicity; Sentiment Analysis; Chrome Extension;
Inspiration
The web is just toxic because you and I can be toxic.
The Problem of Internet
- Everyone hates that the internet can be really mean.
- Everyone hates the cyberbullies, the keyboard warriors, the irrational haters that contribute to this issue.
- Yet, everyone can easily become a bully, a hater, a keyboard warrior because people may get angry and act on anger without thinking twice.
- Hence, everyone is in this vicious cycle of internet toxicity. Creating it, spreading it and hating it all at the same time.
As a conclusion, the internet needs to have a sort of measurement, that could not only think twice for us but also help us to think twice.
We need a “frenly™” internet.
Solution
frenly™ is a Chrome extension that vows to end the vicious cycle of internet toxicity in the web, by proactively preventing toxicity from spreading and creating. Features as below:
1. Read Post / Comments
- When our backend sentiment analysis engine detects potentially toxic comments in the loaded web page, they will be censored by an overlaying color block.
- The user may choose to reveal the negative comment at his/her risk.
- If the page contains too many negative comments, we will request the user to consider to leave the page.
- By smartly detecting the web content, user can be in a more active position countering internet toxicity. Whatever is spread, can no longer harm.
2. Write Post / Comments
- We introduce a toxicity meter on the comment textbox. Before a comment is being posted, it is sent to our backend sentiment analysis engine to evaluate its polarity.
- If the polarity goes too negative, the system will pop a window to advise the user to reconsider his/her word choices.
- By initiating respectful reminding alerts, user can no longer fall easily for the emotional trap. Whatever is toxic, can no longer be created.
3. Post / Comment Wrap-Up
- A health check summary is provided to the user to assess his/her average negativity and subjectivity of input history.
- Implementation wise, we pull the active user's comments and posts using Facebook API and Twitter API and feed them into our sentiment analysis engine for evaluation.
- Tokenization is performed on the user's comments and posts to find out the top 5 most significant words used in each social media platform.
- By actively studying user’s internet speech, user can learn more about him/herself and cultivate the right mindset.
Together with all 3 aspects, we hope to create a lightweight, yet powerful tool to help to build a nicer, friendlier web community.
What's Next For frenly™
- frenly™ is now supported to run on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. We hope that it could be extended on other social media platforms to continue its effort on combating cyber negativity.
- frenly™'s backend sentiment analysis engine could be improved to achieve more precise detection on negative and potentially harmful comments.
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