I have long said (half jokingly) that YouTube comments are a lot like the graffiti you find on the walls of dive bar bathrooms. In other words, nothing good is found in them. There are some exceptions to that rule but they are few and far between. It seems that Google agrees with me because they recently launched through Jigsaw, one of their subsidiaries, a Chrome extension designed to hide toxic comments on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Disqus.

Tune is a Chrome extension that you can use to filter toxic comments out of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Disqus. Once you have the extension installed you can choose which networks you want to apply Tune to. Tune will then attempt to identify toxic comments and filter them from your view. You can unhide the comments if you want to know what Tune hid for you.

I installed Tune this week and applied it to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. It certainly filtered everything that could be considered toxic and lots of other comments that were totally benign. Fortunately, you can tune Tune to help it learn what is and isn’t a toxic comment. I ended up clicking “no” on the question of “should this be hidden?” that Tune presents to you whenever you unhide a comment.

Applications for Education
Tune could be a good Chrome extension for students to use to remove negativity from the comment streams on the some of the social networks that they use. I like that Tune is quite strict about what it lets through for display. If students don’t see negative comments, they can’t feed the trolls on social media.