Twitter announced in a blog post today that it’ll be implementing additional tools and signals to distinguish playful trolling from hateful, detractive comments that ruin the conversation. Thousands of behavioral cues—such as heavily tweeting at accounts you don’t even follow—will provide the service with more informed data so that it can protect healthy conversation from unwelcome nuisances.
In March, the company specifically began focusing on trolls—many of whom aren’t even violating the platform’s policies, but are substantially detracting from engaging conversation. While these apparently account for less than one percent of Twitter accounts, the platform maintains that this portion of users still significantly affects the online experience. Today’s blog post expounds on the newer, additional signals it’ll incorporate to further protect the site’s integrity.
“There are many new signals we’re taking in, most of which are not visible externally,” the post reads. “Just a few examples include if an account has not confirmed their email address, if the same person signs up for multiple accounts simultaneously, accounts that repeatedly Tweet and mention accounts that don’t follow them, or behavior that might indicate a coordinated attack. We’re also looking at how accounts are connected to those that violate our rules and how they interact with each other.”
Essentially, Twitter is making a strong effort to distinguish itself from its competitors right now, particularly since we live in a post-Cambridge Analytica world, where social media platforms must convince their customers that the integrity and quality assurance inherent to their services remain protected and secure at all costs.
For Twitter, this means utilizing an amalgamation of code-based rules, human reviews, and machine learning—which will all help organize and present content to the user in a purportedly healthier way, in areas such as search and conversation. Hence, tweets that don’t violate the rules but were submitted by users whom Twitter deems problematic will remain visible—you’ll just have to click on “Show more replies” to access them.
According to Twitter, early tests of this newfangled system have already shown four percent fewer abuse reports from search and eight percent fewer abuse reports from conversations across the globe. While the blog post clearly expresses that this is an imperfect system that will definitely result in some improper classifications, the company is adamant that this is a solid first step in the right direction. In other words, it’s high time to confirm your email address on Twitter if you haven’t yet.
