After one year of testing, Twitter is finally launching its offensive tweet warning feature for all users to encourage people to pause and reconsider a potentially harmful or offensive reply before they hit send.
This feature is enabled for all accounts that have English in their language settings and is rolling for iOS and Android users starting now.
“We began testing prompts last year that encouraged people to pause and reconsider a potentially harmful or offensive reply — such as insults, strong language, or hateful remarks — before Tweeting it. Once prompted, people had an opportunity to take a moment and make edits, delete, or send the reply as is.”
According to Twitter, these prompts resulted in people sending “less potentially offensive replies across the service:”
- If prompted, 34% of people revised their initial reply or decided not to send their reply at all.
- After being prompted once, people composed, on average, 11% fewer offensive replies in the future.
- If prompted, people were less likely to receive offensive and harmful replies back.
After this year of testing, this is how Twitter incorporated these prompts into the system:
- Consideration of the nature of the relationship between the author and replier, including how often they interact. For example, if two accounts follow and reply to each other often, there’s a higher likelihood that they have a better understanding of the preferred tone of communication.
- Adjustments to our technology to better account for situations in which language may be reclaimed by underrepresented communities and used in non-harmful ways.
- Improvement to our technology to more accurately detect strong language, including profanity.
- Created an easier way for people to let us know if they found the prompt helpful or relevant.
Recently, Twitter announced its Spaces feature is now available to everyone with at least 600 followers. This Tuesday, the company bought Scroll to prepare for a yet-to-be-revealed subscription tier of its services.
Today, Twitter announced bigger and better images on iOS and Android are now available to everyone. The company started testing this feature in March after several controversies about what the algorithm chose to display.
Author: José Adorno
Source: 9TO5Google
