Toxic Bias: Perspective API Misreads German as More Toxic

Understand

Proprietary public APIs play a crucial and growing role as research tools among social scientists.

• Among such APIs, Google's machine learning-based Perspective API is extensively utilized for assessing the toxicity of social media messages, providing both an important resource for researchers and automatic content moderation.
• However, this paper exposes an important bias in Perspective API concerning German language text.
• Through an in-depth examination of several datasets, we uncover intrinsic language biases within the multilingual model of Perspective API.