Not for a moment. They give no numbers on false positives, and I imagine it’s astronomical.
If anything, I can see human moderators having to do more work to restore falsely flagged content than they currently have to do in removing content - but humans are lazy, so instead we’ll just see content going in the “extremism” bin, along with a mandatory report to the government, and people being taken to court for spreading extremist content, which is actually cat videos.
The key point for me is that Amber Rudd wouldn't rule out forcing tech companies to use it by law.
If the UK government are going to throw their weight behind a tool, they'd better hope that it's of sufficient quality to not be torn to shreds by some of the most technically competent people in the world.
The UK government has always had a hostile approach to technology. Now they want to give a tech company the chance to be hostile back, and if this tool doesn't work I can see a very public response to the legitimacy of this tool.
Whether it works or not has nothing to do with whether people will be forced to use it. Tech companies who fight it will get "ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE" headlines against them in the Mail.
On that subject, I'm surprised that we haven't seen a clash between journalists and the "tech elite" yet.
Sure, there's a lot of crap written about Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the like on printed media, but given how reliant UK broadcasters are on social media I'm surprised a negative reaction hasn't led to Twitter banning journalists, or Google de-listing a publication for hate-speech.
If anything, I can see human moderators having to do more work to restore falsely flagged content than they currently have to do in removing content - but humans are lazy, so instead we’ll just see content going in the “extremism” bin, along with a mandatory report to the government, and people being taken to court for spreading extremist content, which is actually cat videos.
It’s a Kafkaesque nightmare in the making.