Description
"Although people of all genders can experience violence and abuse online, the abuse experienced by women is often sexist or misogynistic in nature, and online threats of violence against women are often sexualized and include specific references to women’s bodies. " - Amnesty International. This abuse pushes women offline, affecting their social well-being, representation and economic potential.
In this talk I will discuss how we plan to help resolve this with our browser extension, Opt Out. I will discuss the online global tragedy that is online sexual harassment, our idea and where we’re at with current implementation. I will also talk about what it’s like to build an open source activism project, one which aims to be lead by the community it’s trying to protect.
We will cover current research and results from our own engagement with the community, where the idea came from and challenges we have faced and plan to face in the future. I will also dive into the intricate world of natural language processing (NLP) for online harassment and talk about balancing state-of-the-art data science with web development in an open source community, one being managed by someone relatively new to tech.