Squadbox

Friend sourced moderation of your own inbox: a helper screens messages on your behalf.

About Squadbox

Squadbox is a research project built by the Haystack Group at MIT CSAIL. It is built for people who are experiencing harassment by email or who need an email address to give out to strangers or post publicly. Squadbox is 100% open source and licensed under an MIT license.

The Squadbox team has been working with the Mozilla Open Leaders Program and was conceived at the Beyond Comments workshop hosted by the Coral Project at MIT Media Lab.

Drafted from squadbox.org · not yet confirmed by Squadbox

How it works

Squadbox flips moderation from platform to person. Someone being harassed by email recruits friends ("a squad") to screen their inbox. Mail is forwarded to Squadbox, the squad reviews it against rules the owner sets, abusive messages are filtered out or tagged, and clean mail goes through. The target never has to read the abuse.

It came out of MIT CSAIL research and is best understood as a working demonstration of friend sourced moderation. The code is open; the hosted service has come and gone.