Hire Friends to Stop Online Harassment
A new tool recently released by a research group at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab offers a new way to combat online harassment: keep your trusted friends from getting unwanted emails from your account.
Even if you are not a small internet celebrity, a self-confident social media star with a large following, or a super popular streamer, it is possible that you have been harassed online – and perhaps even more harassed – if the people who do not do not like you. or, in your opinion, your personal email address. While great inbox filters can help you stop a small stream of terrible emails, you may need more firepower if you face an avalanche every day (and still want to receive emails from unknown but legitimate people).
A service from the MIT team, Squadbox , is pretty straightforward. Instead of sharing your real email address on a public website, forum, or video stream, you use your Squadbox email account. That, or if you are already posting your real email address, you can set up filters to forward potentially problematic emails to the “group” of helpers you set up. As Squadbox’s creators describe :
“When an email arrives for moderation, the moderator will assess, adding annotations and rationale as needed. The message is then processed according to the preferences of the owner, for example, the email is delivered with a special tag, placed in a specific folder, or discarded. “
When I created a test account, I found it pretty easy to create a “team” by inviting friends and giving them a helpful description of what content I want (and don’t want) to see in my inbox. Squadbox can automatically reject any emails with attachments, which is useful if jerks are sending you unwanted images or files, and it is also easy to add your Gmail contacts to the Squadbox whitelist to make sure authentic emails are never accidentally blocked by the window ‘or yours. moderated time.
As Squadbox points out, the entire system is still in beta, so you can probably expect to see more features and improvements as the team improves on the (free) service. I found one little quirk – figuring out your official Squadbox email address is a little confusing. You and your team of moderators do not receive emails at [squadname] @ squadbox.org, but rather at [squadname] @ squadbox.csail.mit.edu. Quite a bit, and I’m sure the MIT team can make Squadbox’s customization process super-intuitive once the service is ready for official release.
However, Squadbox is an interesting concept if you have friends ready to help fight the worst on the Internet. Or maybe you don’t mind paying your buddies to help you fight the avalanche of crappy emails on a daily basis.