Gadgetory

it's CES week here in Las Vegas which is usually all about connecting people through technology it's amazing and inspiring but the enormous benefits of the internet come with dangers as well sixty-five percent of internet users aged 18 to 29 that reported being abused or harassed online and it's worse for young women and minorities so this year Intel recode and vox media herejust parent company a partner on new initiative called pack harassment which aims to fight the effects of abuse and harassment online the plan is to hold a series of hackathons throughout the year with a major progress report in May at the code conference i sat down with kara swisher the executive editor rico and brian krzanich the CEO of Intel to talk about hacking harassment and what they hope to achieve the internet creates an environment where people could do whatever they want it really does and sort of ugly size them come out in a way they wouldn't in civil society and so one of the things we have to do is try to create one tools to help people who are the victims of this and secondly make these companies aware that this is an important topic for everybody who's using their their things from facebook to Google to snapchat to anyone else so what's the goal of the hackathon so you'll be doing throughout the year you know I think there's there's really two goals in the hackathon first there are potentially some genuine technical solutions we can come up with there may be things like identifying key words phrases actual context their messages and telling the person that may be interpreted as harassment and and giving them that feedback before they that might slow things down the second part of the hack the harassment is just getting a word up at the end of the day I think we can make a lot of technology they can reduce the harassment levels but it's gonna be when the peer pressure when it just becomes unacceptable societally that's when harassment will really change it really sounds like what you want is to for these companies to commit to building tools for the users to control those easy tools not tools they have tools they're just hard to use I they still I just the other day I had an incident with someone on Twitter and it was really difficult and I'm good at this if I can't figure it out the average teenager who's getting you know pilloried on Facebook or Twitter or wherever has no hope of being able to do this except to sign off and that shouldn't be the only choice you have is to sign off so at the code conference in may the goal is to present some findings and some concrete steps forward what are you hoping to announce that what what if you could get everything you wanted what would you be announcing and it goes like this what I'd love for the maid code event is to see that the partner list of exploded so that there's tens if not hundreds of partners that are really joining forces and that we've done a couple of these harassment the hot dog restaurant events and and we have a couple of solutions so we can start to talk about and say these are some things we recommend that sites like your own and and like ours can start to implement and help technically reduce the amount of harassment as well look online harassment is a real problem there's a lot of work that needs to be done to solve it obviously the Verge's part of ox mania and I'm proud to be partners in the hacker assmann initiative but there are still a lot of questions need to be answered a lot of solutions that need to be developed and a lot of partners have to sign up