We are building tools to remove online misogyny and help female-identifying people engage with healthy online discussion
Skip to the bit you want to know about
- Our Tools and Our Vision
- Our Roadmap
- The Repos and their Roles
- Use Our Tools
- Develop Our Tools
- Our Organisation
- Our Code of Conduct
- Help us with Our Vision
- Our Mission
We currently have five tools we're working on to combat online misogyny. Here's a brief description of each tool:
- Browser Extension: works like adBlocker but removes misogyny instead of adverts
- Website: allows an individual to support and inform themselves
- Activism: saying boo to the misogyny gooses
- Research: understanding online misogyny and the problem domain
- Modeling: modeling online misogyny with data science
Our browser extension is designed to remove misogyny from an individual's social media feed, automatically alerting the moderators of the platform to the detected abuse. However we are consent and not censorship focused. We’re designing our browser extension to have a local instance of the model that you can supply feedback to. By giving the individual control over what they do and don’t see whilst keeping their data private and upholding their safety, we hope to show female-identifying people that their voices can be heard online without the traumatizing consequences.
Our website aims to support female-identifying getting their voices back and sustain the movement. Currently the website is only informative about Opt Out Tools. However, inspired by HarassMap, an Egyptian based NGO that allows people to submit reports of physical harassment which are displayed online on a map, our website will allow an individual to anonymously submit details of their harassment. This data will be stored, studied and feed the models that our other tools use, for example the browser extension. Our website will transparently show details of the usage statistics of the tools and show female-identifying clearly how their participation by submitting their reports is helping to fuel the movement and show our "antidote to silicon valley KPIs”. Our long-term goal is to display a “virtual” harass map on our website, showing which communities on your selected social media platform are misogynistic or sexually aggressive or just downright abusive, enabling female-identifying to navigate the murky waters of online society as best they can.
We’re holding workshops that give female-identifying people a chance to meet and share their experiences online. By doing this we not only give much needed support to these people but allow them to come together and in doing so, act in a form of protest. By helping to form this community, it helps us identify needed technical infrastructure and ensures that our tools are fit for purpose enabling our tech to be as community-driven as possible.
We’re also holding workshops and hackathons to develop our “antidote to silicon valley KPIs": KPIs that try to measure diversity, inclusivity and health of online conversation. Current metrics of participation such as no. of shares, no. of clicks etc. have ensured that the social media tech giants live in the pockets of most people on the planet. But these simple metrics of participation don’t tell the full story. We want to do it differently.
Our tech is here to solve real-world problems. It's vital to us that we compile and understand the latest research around online misogyny to inform our technical decisions.
We're designing a research roadmap which will be used to compile research about many aspects of online life. Our initial focus shall be on online misogyny, how it is currently defined by various actors, the cause and effects and what online misogyny means to Opt Out Tools.
As our research grows we will widen our focus to look into ethical AI and content moderation online, what is currently being done in these spaces and how we can help or do it better.
Language is incredibly nuanced. Our strategy is to develop a misogyny model that removes misogyny targeted at a particular group of female-identifying people being harassed online. By initially targeting our protection to a specific group of people, we will improve the accuracy of our model, ensuring that we remove what is truly misogynistic to this group and nothing else. As we better understand online misogyny and how to model it we will improve our model to have an increased range of groups whom our tool is of use to.
Currently we are focusing on Twitter and using Natural Language Processing to understand the sentiment of a tweet. However this is a very simple model of how language works. Language has content, context, is part of a conversation and has meaning embedded in the words. To capture this and make our machine learning models as precise as possible, we will eventually include network analysis, computational linguistics and other techniques, so that we are as sure as we can be that the comment is misogynistic.
Also it is important to state here our commitment to understanding the biases and implications of the modeling that we are doing. We will also be looking into fairness metrics, dialect identification and model bias to understand and communicate the limitations of our work. We understand that misogyny sounds different in different dialects or social groups, and our model should understand that to avoid potential biases against any particular group of people.
We have curated a misogyny dataset and have built a binary classifier misogyny model which is the model behind the basic implementation of the browser extension. The browser extension is only available to use via GitHub.
Our website is up and can be found at optoutools.com but we need to improve its content and design, and work on some GDPR related issues, where we need help. Due to this, the report functionality is currently not activated. If you can contribute any of these we'd be eternally grateful.
We've held multiple workshops, not just around the topic of online misogyny.
Our workshops include:
- Can we Measure the Inclusivity of Online Discussions?
- Consequence Scanning for Opt Out and Online Content Moderation
- Online Harassment: Let's talk.
If you'd like to know more about these, please each out at @OptOutSocial.
We've done thorough research up until now but there are gaps. We have a definition of misogyny, an idea of the problem domain but there's a still a lot to do. It's time to decide on a research roadmap. This roadmap is expected to include researching different definitions of misogyny at different levels, sociolinguistic study of misogyny and more.
We have a misogyny dataset and model, but we need to know how it's doing. We're currently in the process of writing error analysis scripts to do just that. We're also looking at more complex approaches such as deep learning models.
At Opt Out Tools, we’re building tools to help all female-identifying people with something to say, trust that they can take part in healthy online discussion safely. We want social media platforms to be a respectful place where any can comment without fear of viscous retaliation, inclusive so all voices can flourish and safe so no person has to worry about what happens after they switch off their laptop. We want the social networks to be better for all. We want to achieve this by building tools and an organisation that with these values and consent, privacy and transparency at its core.
* * *
For further details of the next steps for each of the tools and other work please see the Roadmaps. Please note, the Roadmaps will be more up to date than the image, so do look at the links below
* * *
An overview of the repositories we have an what they are there for
- opt-out: the front-end for the browser extension
- website: the front-end for the website
- public_api: the joint back-end for the website and browser extension
- theory-of-online-misogyny: qualitative research into online misogyny
- study-online-misogyny: quantitative research into online misogyny
* * *
Our browser extension works only on Firefox. The code to load the browser extension can be found in opt-out.
To use the current version:
- Clone a local copy of the master branch of the extension repo
- Start Mozilla Firefox (make sure you have the latest installed v69.0 at least)
- Set the url to
about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefoxand hit enter - In the
Load Teporary Add-onsbox, open and loadmanifest.jsonwhich can be found in theextensionsfolder of this repo you cloned locally - Open Twitter and test!
- If you make changes to the code you would like to test, make sure you click "reload" (left of the "remove" button) to apply new changes to script
Go to our website optoutools.com and click the submit a report button to submit details of your experience of online misogyny.
Look at the notebooks to see our modeling efforts.
Disclaimer: the data includes harsh and misogynistic statements. Avoid looking at the data if that's a trigger for you.
Our twitter handle is @OptOutSocail, spread our message!
Checkout the theory of online misogyny and its wiki
* * *
Is anything broken?
Here is a diagram depicting the technical architecture of Opt Out Tools.
A key:
- square boxes are different repositories
- purple labels are the repository where the code for the component lives
- blue is not implemented yet
- arrows indicate information exchange and flow
The browser extension and website share a common back-end called public_api. Documentation for these two APIs can be find in the public_api repo.
It is important to note that we do not currently have an automated model deployment mechanism.
The browser extension removes online misogyny from an individual's Twitter feed. We have a binary classifier model deployed on some servers and as the page loads the tweets are sent to the backend, the model is hit and returns a score. If the misogyny score is above the threshold set by the user, the text is blocked out, if not it’s left on the page. If there is an image attached to the comment that is also blocked.
Tech stack:
- Javascript
For further details on developing it click here
This is the front-end for our website. Tech stack:
- Javascript
- Angular 8.0
For further details on developing it click here
This has two API's for the website and the browser extension. Tech stack:
- Python
- Django
For further details on developing it click here
We study online misogyny here. You can find our current work and our future plans here.
Tech stack:
- Python/R
- Data science (text analytics, network analysis.. etc.)
For further details on developing it click here
Go to the theory of online misogyny and contribute to the issues or wiki.
* * *
The only thing better than being able to work on a project that really means something, is being able to work on it with a community of great people.
We have experts from across the world working with a variety of skills from UX to network analysis. More transparency to come.
* * *
Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.
Our intention is to never ever re-victimize anyone. However we deal with explicit content and sometimes we forget to sanitize a work or add a disclaimer that it may content explicit content. If this happens, please let us know and we'll rectify the matter immediately.
* * *
Opt Out Tools is an open source project under active development. Currently, machine learning models are being evaluated for their ability to classify misogynistic text. If you would like to contribute to the project, please see the CONTRIBUTING.md first, and then check out the CONTRIBUTING.md for the repo you want to work on.
A 5 second contribution can be to ⭐ the opt-out repo, the more stars we get the more likely we are to get funding 😄
If you would like to fund the project or make a donation, please email Opt Out Tools or hit the sponsor button above , which will take you to our Open Collective page.
* * *
We’re a mixed team, including social sciences, UX and lots of data nerds. We’re all working voluntarily in our spare time to make the internet accessible for all. What’s most important about us is that we’re a group of people that wont let hate win.
We want to champion female-identifying people back into the online worlds they’ve been chased out of, support them and their voices whilst still protecting them and holding the perpetrators accountable. We need to exist.
If you share our vision, we ask you to join us. Whether it’s by talking about this to a friend, contributing, research, expertise, skills, strategy or code. Online misogyny is real and it's silencing the voices that society so desperately needs to hear.
