How Toxic Is Twitter? Universities Are Working to Find Out
How Toxic Is Twitter? Universities Are Working to Find
Out
Twitter selects Leiden University to study echo chambers
on the platform, while the University of Oxford and University of Amsterdam
will try to measure the health of Twitter conversations.
By Michael Kan July 30, 2018 6:03PM EST
Twitter is looking to the world of academia to find out
why it's so toxic.
The company hired a pair of research groups to measure
the presence of "echo chambers" on Twitter, and whether exposing
users to diverse viewpoints can make a dent in stopping prejudice, it said in a
blog post on Monday.
Five months ago, the company called on the public to
submit ideas about how it might measure "conversational health"
across the platform. This came as Twitter's CEO admitted that the platform had
become a hotbed of harassment, abuse, and propaganda campaigns, despite ongoing
attempts to root out bad content.
To improve Twitter's health, the company asked for
proposals on how the company might go about measuring it. After receiving over
230 proposals, Twitter narrowed down the field to two, both of which came from
universities.
The first research group, led by a professor at Leiden
University, is focused on investigating echo chambers, in which people limit
themselves to following Twitter accounts with like-minded political views.
According to Twitter, a side effect of echo chambers is how they can
"increase hostility and promote resentment towards those not having the
same conversation."
The Leiden-led project will attempt to measure whether
users recognize they're interacting in an echo chamber or engaging with a
diverse set of viewpoints. It'll also try to assess whether computer algorithms
can discern between toxic Twitter conversations containing hate speech, racism
and xenophobia, and those that merely contain "incivility."
The second research group comes from the University of
Oxford and the University of Amsterdam. It'll try to measure the health of
Twitter conversations by looking for text classifiers associated with positive
sentiments and cooperation.
"Evidence from social psychology has shown how
communication between people from different backgrounds is one of the best ways
to decrease prejudice and discrimination," Oxford University professor
Miles Hewstone wrote in the blog post. "We're aiming to investigate how
this understanding can be used to measure the health of conversations on
Twitter, and whether the effects of positive online interaction carry across to
the offline world."
Twitter hasn't offered a timetable for when the research
will be completed. But the company's CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted: "To set
expectations, this is going to take some time to do right. We're committing to
be open with our findings and progress."
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