New research indicates that preventing the online proliferation of hate speech could be effected using a similar technique to that deployed against malicious software.

Axar.az reports citing foreign media in a proposal titled ‘Quarantining online hate speech: technical and ethical perspectives’, published in the Ethics and Information Technology journal, researchers at the University of Cambridge advocate implementing a ‘quarantine’ approach for preventing and addressing hate speech and threats. The technique, which has its roots in the cybersecurity practices employed to prevent the spread of malware, uses databases of hateful and violent language to build an algorithm capable of anticipating and corralling potential hate speech.

The algorithm is currently in the early stages, but its developers predict that, once it has been sufficiently refined, it could act in a similar fashion to spam and malware filters. When a user receives a hateful or threatening message, the software will provide them with a ‘severity score’, the name of the sender and the option to either view the message or delete it unread.