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Twitter Turns to Algorithms to Clamp Down on Abusive Content

Twitter Turns to Algorithms to Clamp Down on Abusive Content 4j5k1a

By Abby Ohlheiser, The Washington Post | Updated: 2 March 2017 11:33 IST

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Twitter announced a bunch of mostly iterative changes Wednesday in its fight against abuse. But one was particularly welcome to s who have ever experienced an onslaught of anonymous harassment on the platform: It's finally possible to filter out s with the default "egg" profile picture, so that they don't appear in your notifications. p2u6g

Sure, it's considered very bad form on Twitter to keep your profile picture as the default egg, but that's not why this overdue change is useful. Twitter makes it very easy for anyone to create new s, including those who make "throwaway" Twitter handles specifically for the purpose of harassing someone else. This change makes it harder for those s to reach their intended targets.

In addition to introducing a notification filter for anyone without a custom profile picture, Twitter will also let you filter out notifications from s who haven't bothered to their email addresses or phone numbers.

Twitter said the filters would be available to "everyone on Twitter" once they roll out, and provided instructions for how to turn it on via the iPhone app.

The platform also improved upon its rollout of a "mute by keyword" feature for notifications that was first introduced in November. s can now also mute keywords, phrases and conversations from their timelines, and set time limits for how long those mutes will last. If I wanted to keyword mute, say, mentions of "The Walking Dead" or whatever show I don't watch that everyone else on Twitter loves, I could set a mute for the relevant keywords, and let it automatically expire after a day, a week or a month. Or, I could let the mute live on indefinitely, which is tempting.

Ed Ho, Twitter's vice president of engineering, acknowledged in a blog post that the two changes were widely requested from Twitter's base.

The company has long struggled to effectively address the abuse and harassment problem that plagues many of Twitter's s, not to mention the reputation of Twitter itself. In recent months, it's tried to do more about it, rolling out long-requested tweaks to its safety procedures. Twitter is also clearly trying to regain the trust of s who have given up on its ability to effectively solve this problem, which brings us to another announced change on Wednesday: Algorithms are starting to play a bigger role in how Twitter identifies potential abuse.

Twitter Reverses Decision to Stop Notifying s When They’re Added to Lists

Twitter is starting to "identify s as they're engaging in abusive behavior, even if this behavior hasn't been reported to us," Ho wrote. And when its algorithms do detect potentially abusive behavior, Twitter is issuing temporary limitations on those s. Some have asked Twitter to be more proactive in identifying potential abuse, instead of simply relying on reports and the s who evaluate those reports.

But the rollout of this change hasn't been without controversy. The "timeouts" freaked out a bunch of s last week, who noticed them before Twitter's official announcement, because it wasn't clear what exactly was prompting these timeouts to be issued. Some s who, for instance, swore at the official of the vice president were triggering these punishments last week. People started speculating that Twitter was starting to punish any that swore at a verified , reviving criticism of how Twitter handles high-profile instances of abuse and harassment.

There's plenty to be said about Twitter's longtime inconsistency in enforcing its own abuse policies, and the role that media attention has played in getting the company to take action. On Wednesday, Twitter confirmed that the new timeouts might be triggered "if an is repeatedly tweeting without solicitation at non-followers," among other factors.

Ho wrote that the company's aim is "to only act on s when we're confident, based on our algorithms," that abusive behavior has occurred, but acknowledged that the new process will inevitably make "mistakes."

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