Students from the University of Ottawa and McGill University have partnered to develop a new software that blurs out homophobic, racist, sexist, transphobic, and other hateful language while browsing the web. Third-year UOttawa statistics student Nikola Draca said that he and McGill Engineering student Angus McLean designed the software, called Soothe, as an extension for the Google Chrome web browser. Draca says that the prevalence of cyberbullying was one of the main reasons behind the project: “it’s becoming an extremely relevant issue. We personally thought that there wasn’t enough attention being put on it despite it being talked about very often. And we wanted to empower people suffering from anxiety, PTSD online and just do a small part of making their online experience better.”
CBC