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Beginning a Career in Research Hannah Kirk (2015) is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford and Researcher at the Alan Turing Institute. Here, we report on her recently published work, before Hannah gives advice on beginning a career as a researcher. Detecting Online Harms Hannah recently co-authored a paper on the challenges presented by emojis for Artificial Intelligence models used to detect hateful online content. Commercial content moderation algorithms were found to be less effective at finding hateful posts that were emoji-based, rather than text-based. People who make such posts can replace hateful words with an emoji and stand a much better chance of getting through existing filters. Context is an important factor – a banana emoji, for example, can be completely innocent, or can be used to racially abuse people. Hannah and her colleagues created their own tool to address the issue. Their approach
resulted in large improvements, increasing both the model’s ability to identify a wider range of emojibased hate and to minimise the amount of non-hateful content that it incorrectly flags. Hannah said: “Fully understanding how big tech moderates online hate is almost impossible because they do not make their models available for scrutiny. However, the amount of racist abuse following the Euro 2020 final clearly shows there are problems with emoji-based hate. Detecting emoji-based hate is not a fundamentally difficult task, and the failure of commercial AI systems to detect such hate is deeply troubling. More can be done to keep people safe online, particularly people from already marginalised communities.” 18 18
