Everyone has someone in their surroundings who makes sarcastic comments or maybe you are someone who uses this ‘humorous way’ to express yourself. Sarcasm does not only exist in the offline world, it also expands to the online world. In extreme forms it is even used on social media for threats, for example on Twitter. For all police units around the world these forms of threats takes a lot of time. Sarcasm makes it hard to distinguish humor and threats. That’s why the US Secret Service decided to seek for software that can discriminate humor and threats on Twitter. According to US Secret Service this software needs to analyse social media data so it can detect threats for national security, or at least narrow their search. Reactions on this intend are mainly, (how ironic), sarcastic.. An example of a sarcastic reaction can be seen in the figure below.
Next to these sarcastic reactions there are some serious concerns about the freedom of expression. Ginger McCall, who is an associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says that the move could restrict people’s ability to freely express themselves. People will think twice before they express themselves online and this takes away the impulsivity of this medium.
Besides, there are also critics about the software itself. Peter Eckersley, who works as a technology projects director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that computers cannot detect underlying attitudes. In his opinion conversations are too complex for a computer. Not only Peter Eckersley thinks that this project infeasible, also language and other software experts share his opinion.
Do you think a sarcasm detector restricts the freedom of speech and would you think twice before posting? Besides, do you think it is achievable for a computer to accurately analyse these underlying intentions of a conversation?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2649778/Thatll-definitely-help-U-S-Secret-Service-buys-special-software-detect-SARCASM-Twitter.html
http://www.volkskrant.nl/media/-fantastisch-idee-secret-service-koopt-detector-voor-sarcastische-dreigtweets~a3667366/
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27711109
While reading your post I was really curious as to how the US Secret Service will manage to correctly identify sarcastic posts/comments online. Even people have trouble realizing some things are sarcastic sometimes, which makes it so hard to imagine that a machine could do this correctly. However, if it actually succeeded, that would be pretty cool. I don’t think it should restrict freedom of speech though, especially online.