Less Hate, More Speech on Adevărul LIVE

Recently, the online show Adevărul Live featured updates from the Less Hate, More Speech research project, pertaining especially to the online comment moderation system stage that was implemented in April 2015 on a national website.

Representatives of MRC and GSP.ro, the national website hosting the moderation experiment, explained the global context in which publishers from around the world are affected by aggressive and hateful comments, why they, at times, decide to close their comment sections and what they chose to implement instead.

With regards to the research that MRC is conducting on two national websites (gsp.ro and tolo.ro), findings show, five months since the kickoff of the project, that less than a quarter of all comments need moderation (22% of the 215.837 comments registered in the April 6 – September 7 2015 period). The most frequent hate-speech categories found in comments have, so far, been vulgar or offensive language, racism and xenophobia.