Hmmmm, not sure this will work to be honest.
If you’re a regular user of the hellscape that is Twitter, you’ll know that it can be quite an angry and confrontational place to hang around.
But Twitter is self-aware. It knows that bullying and abuse have been serious issues on its platform for many years and has now said it will take steps to try and make people be kinder online.
It has said it will prompt users to review and revise “potentially harmful or offensive” replies.
The feature was tested out last year but will now be rolled out across its platform, beginning with English language accounts using Twitter on Apple and Android.
From the trial, Twitter said it discovered:
- If prompted, 34% of people revised their initial reply or decided to not 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.
Twitter said the prompts are designed to consider the nature of the relationship between the author and replier, including how often they interact.
“If two accounts follow and reply to each other often, there’s a higher likelihood that they have a better understanding of preferred tone of communication,” the company said in a blog post.
Will this be effective? Time will tell, but it certainly can’t make it worse… can it?
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