February 2017

Civil conversation in the comment sections of news sites can be hard to come by these days. Whatever intelligent observations do lurk there are often drowned out by obscenities, ad-hominem attacks, and off-topic rants. Some sites, like the one you’re reading, hide the comments section behind a link at the bottom of each article; many others have abolished theirs completely. For those outlets who can’t hire 14 full-time moderators to comb through roughly 11,000 comments a day, help is on the way. Jigsaw, the Google-owned technology incubator, released a tool that uses machine-learning algorithms to separate out the worst comments that people leave online.

The tool, called Perspective, learned from the best: It analyzed the Times moderators’ decisions as they triaged reader comments, and used that data to train itself to identify harmful speech. The training materials also included hundreds of thousands of comments on Wikipedia, evaluated by thousands of different moderators.

This report looks at the way that the US print media has covered technology over the past 30 years, examining the claims that a typical reader of national newspapers is likely to have seen during that time.

The findings show that coverage of technology in the 1980s and early 1990s was largely favorable, with a heavy focus on the economic and military advantages afforded by advancing technologies. In the late 1980s, in particular, there was a notable focus on the economic opportunities afforded by the developing technology sector and its offerings. However, that tone has gradually shifted over the years, with more articles highlighting the potential ill effects of technology: its displacement of face-to-face interaction, its role in environmental degradation, its threat to employment, and its failure to live up to some of the promises made on its behalf. The findings also indicate that positive and negative claims are more likely to be associated with certain segments of society than others. Claims about the potentials of technology and their associated benefits are more likely to come out of the private sector, while claims about the potential problems are more likely to come from actors in civil society and government.