Content warning: this project uses a dataset of real toxic comments. This post doesn't quote any of them.

You can't share real moderation data from work, and you shouldn't. But you can practise every core trust and safety analytics skill on public data. So I did: I trained two content moderation models on 1.8 million public comments and measured them the way a trust and safety team would.

Everything is public: the Kaggle notebook , the model and its model card , a demo that runs in your browser and the code . The project write-up is on my site .

The data

The Civil Comments dataset has 1.8 million comments from news sites, each rated by several people for toxicity, insults, threats and more. It's released under CC0, so anyone can use it. Crucially, a subset is also labelled with the identity groups each comment mentions , which makes a fairness check possible. 8% of comments are toxic.

Two models

A simple baseline: TF-IDF word features with logistic regression.…