Twitter, in its newest attempt to improve the health of the social platform, will modify the way conversations happen based on the behavior and conduct of users versus the actual content of tweets.
In a report by BuzzFeed, there are thousands of behavior signals that will be used to filter search, replies and algorithmic recommendations, pushing tweets from offending users farther down the time line.
There are behavior signals that could result in content getting demoted, and these can include:
- Users who tweet at a large number of accounts they don’t follow
- The frequency a user has been blocked by people they interact with
- If a user has created many accounts using a single IP address
- If an account is closely related to accounts that have violated Twitter’s terms of service.
According to Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, said that many of the company’s past actions to monitor abuse have been content-based. The company has shifted more and more toward conduct and behaviors on the system.
The changes should roll out this week, and the behavior filters will be optional but turned on by default. Users will have a filter called “Show Everything” that they can toggle off and on.
In early test results, Twitter claimed that the changes led to an 8 percent drop in abuse reports on conversations and a 4 percent drop in abuse reports in search. According to Twitter, fewer than 1 percent of total accounts are responsible for the abuse reports it receives.
Dorsey says that the latest modifications to conversations point to the biggest-impact change on the platform and that its a first step towards something he sees “going quite far.”
Twitter has published a blog post about the changes, outlining the steps it is taking to address what it defined as “troll” behavior.