https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/15/17352962/twitter-abuse-changes-ranking-tweets-conversations-search
Twitter
will hide more bad tweets in conversations and searches
Another move to reduce abuse
By
Twitter already ranks
tweets in search and in conversations. But until now, it has not taken negative
signals into account when ranking them. This has meant that replies could
easily be gamed by bad actors, whether they’re spammers hawking
cryptocurrencies or bot networks
attempting to influence elections.
Twitter will now begin
examining a much wider variety of signals when ranking tweets in conversations
and in search, Dorsey said. Some of those signals include number of accounts
created by the person tweeting, IP address, and whether the tweet had led people
to block the person tweeting it. Twitter won’t remove the tweets from Twitter,
it said, but they will now be moved to the “see more replies” section of a
conversation, where they are hidden behind an additional tap.
A test of the
new approach to ranking found that the number of abuse reports generated from
conversations declined by 8 percent, the company said. “The spirit of the thing
is, we want to take the burden of the work off the people receiving the abuse
or harassment,” Dorsey said.
Relying on algorithmic
signals could have several advantages for Twitter as it works to reduce abuse
on the platform. They work without respect to the content of the tweet, sparing
Twitter from having to make tricky decisions around the tone or intent of a
message. And they work regardless of the language the tweet was written in,
allowing the company to roll the changes out globally all at once.
At the same time,
decisions made by algorithms can also go disastrously awry, and can be
difficult for outsiders to understand. Dorsey said Twitter is conscious of that
and would invest in making sure the product communicated about how it makes
decisions. The company will also consider issuing reports on the enforcement
actions it takes across the platform, said Del Harvey, the company’s vice
president of trust and safety.
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