journalism.co.uk – As one third of audience switches off from news, the public broadcaster is testing a tool that would allow readers to blur out stories that may impact their mental health – “Would you filter out bad news if you could? This is the question that Alicia Grandjean, software engineer at BBC and Tim Cowlishaw, senior software engineer at BBC R&D, wanted the audience to answer. The developers got this idea when a colleague organised an office mental health day to make the team think about the impact technology has on well-being. “We knew from other research that many young people are turning away from news because it was affecting their mental health,” said Grandjean. So the duo came up with a simple-sounding idea – if specific words, such as ‘knife crime’ or ‘murder’ trigger anxiety in readers, they can use a filter that would blur out sensitive content on the BBC homepage. A trigger warning would then inform the reader that the article contains keywords they marked out as sensitive. The team decided to blur out the headline, text and any pictures rather than removing the article altogether with an experimental algorithm that is not yet available to public…”  [h/t Pete Weiss]