Female black journalists and politicians get sent an abusive tweet every 30 seconds

Twitter can be a toxic place. In recent years, trolling and harassment on the site have made it an extremely unpleasant and upsetting experience for many people, particularly women and minorities. But automatically identifying and stopping such abuse is difficult to do accurately and reliably. This is because, for all the recent progress in AI, machines generally still struggle to respond meaningfully to human communication. For example, AI usually finds it hard to pick up on abusive messages that may be sarcastic or disguised with a sprinkling of positive keywords.