June 3rd, 2018: Last month Twitter announced that it is putting in place new measures to fight bullying on this social media platform. Twitter, like Instagram and Facebook, is under pressure to develop ways to reduce the bullying and harassment that goes on online and that too often targets children, women, and minorities.
The new algorithm that Twitter is testing flags problematic accounts by examining behavior. For example, accounts that tweet a lot to accounts that don’t follow them or that have not confirmed their email address may be flagged and their replies on tweets may be pushed down at the bottom of the pile. They may also appear less in searches. These two effects combined will highlight more constructive discussions on Twitter. These behaviors alone will not cause necessarily your account to be suspended but it may cause flagging. When this new algorithm was tested it reduced reporting of bullying and harassment in searches by 4% and in conversations by 8%.
The chief executive and co-founder of Twitter Jack Dorsey (on the left here) said “We want to take the burden of the work off the people receiving the abuse or the harassment,” He also said that the approaches Twitter has used in the past “felt like Whac-A-Mole,” as when measures were taken to curb bullying from one particular group, another would pop up.
Twitter has been working on trying to reduce harassment on this media platform as it is driving people away especially, as mentioned above, from more vulnerable groups. Twitter has had clear rules of conduct on the platform in place for some time now and has had tools available to the users to curb harassment including the options to mute or block accounts and report them (available at this link). However, these measures have not been enough to limit bullying and harassment. Thus, Twitter has renewed their effort to fight bullying and harassment using new methodologies. Other approaches in addition to this new algorithm mentioned above will be implemented in the next months.
Twitter hopes also to revitalize its business, as more people signing up to use this social media platform, instead of being driven away, would mean more marketers willing to pay for adds.
A Charitable Direction 