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Let’s Talk About Hate Speech

Whether your definition of hate speech is broad or narrow, the voice gives a listener much more information about the person behind the ideas they may find harmful, and allows them to make better, more human choices about how to respond. While it’s difficult to predict, we believe Microfone’s unique offering - anonymous voice connection - will generate significantly lower levels of hate speech compared to incumbent platforms for three reasons: 

• It is more difficult to utter bias-motivated, hostile, and malicious language than to type it.

• Humans are adept at judging the paralinguistic cues in voices and naturally avoid this language when spoken.

• Strong disagreements may not meet hate with hate; the human voice has been shown to de-escalate conflict.

For content moderation, our AI stack does a lot of the hard work. Any obvious illegal use of the platform can be removed quite easily. Users can also flag content directly. The up and down voting system will decrease the reach of comments the community finds harmful or offensive.

There will undoubtedly be areas of the world where the prevailing public opinion is racist, homophobic, sexist, and so forth. But there may also be clusters of opinion that defy expectations. One purpose of Microfone is to correct for current social media distortion and get an accurate snapshot of what people actually think, a bellwether for human thought on earth. But certainly, the distinct qualities of voice media, combined with Microfone’s social-graph and reward system, will shape the dynamics of this discussion in new ways.

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