Twitter is updating its “be nice, think twice” system that prompts users to reconsider when they’re about to tweet a “potentially harmful or offensive” reply.
A report by The Verge explained that the upgraded feature is now better at spotting “strong language.” Twitter claims that the tool is more aware of vocabulary that has been “reclaimed by underrepresented communities” and is used in non-harmful ways. It now takes into account the relationship you have with the person you’re sending a message to.
This means if a user tweets at a mutual friend with who he or she interacts on a regular basis, Twitter’s algorithm will assume there is a higher likelihood that this person has a better understanding of the preferred tone of communication” and not show you a prompt. So, you can call your friend a ______ or a _______ or even a _________ son of a ______, and the platform won’t care. That seems like freedom.
Twitter first started testing this feature last year, stopped for a while and continued later this year in the month of February. It’s one of a number of prompts that the Social Media Platform has been testing to try and shape user behaviour, including its “read before you retweet” message.
Improvements to the offensive-tweets prompt have been made and Twitter rolled out to English users of the Twitter iOS app yesterday, May 5th; and to Android users “within the next few days.” The company says it’s already making a difference in how people interact on the platform, though.
It claims internal tests show 34 per cent of people who were served such a prompt revised their initial reply or decided to not send their reply at all. After receiving such a prompt once, people composed, on average, 11 per cent fewer offensive replies. And people who were prompted about a reply (and therefore may have toned down their language) were themselves less likely to receive offensive and harmful replies back.
According to The Verge, “these statistics are as opaque as you would expect from any major internet platform as there’s a question as to how exactly has the company quantified ‘less likely’ in that last example? How many people are included in any of these tests? How do we know that people who revised their reply made it less offensive, or did they just use offensive language the system didn’t recognize?”.
But the ongoing roll-out does suggest that the feature is, at least, not making things actively worse on Twitter. That’s probably the best we can hope for.
