Russian lawmakers want government to develop automated system for hunting Internet trolls

Vadim Dengin, who sits on the Duma Committee for Information Policy and Communications, has submitted a formal request to police and the Communications Ministry asking officials to develop software capable of automatically detecting Internet trolling.

Dengin told the newspaper Izvestia that it’s especially necessary to counteract online trolling when it leads to offline criminal activity. He cites research at Stanford and Cornell universities, where a study funded by Google produced an algorithm “that only needs to observe five to ten online posts to predict whether a member of an online community needs banning,” reported Wired magazine in April 2015.