Twitter as a social networking platform has been under serious scrutiny in the past months because of its notion to protect people’s right to free speech. The governments from the United States of America and India along with several other countries have sent notices to the company to make amends regarding certain Tweets that encourage the chaotic state of violence in their countries but Twitter wants to protect people’s free will to speech and to voice out their opinion on world issues.
However, people don’t understand the difference between voicing out their opinion and spreading hate in the community that can have serious violent consequences, rather it has happened just recently with the Capitol Hill riots fuelled by former President Donald Trump’s supporters via Twitter.
Considering the facts and seriousness of the situation and the tendency of people to network and have negative impacts on the community, Twitter began testing its “anti-bullying” prompts to give potential users a chance to rethink and edit replies and Tweets before they post them.
Recently, the micro-blogging platform has announced to have rolled out this feature for all Android and iOS users who use the application in English language. The Twitter algorithm works to detect potentially harmful and offensive language in people’s comments, replies and Tweets, prompting users to ‘re-think’ and edit text before they hit the post button.
Having said that, Twitter has tweaked the algorithm and made some improvements over last year to reduce cases when users might get anti-bullying prompts before sending their reply, as mentioned in a report by Engadget. The report further mentions that the new algorithm now considers the nature of relationship between the replier and the author which means that sending out mean comments might just be okay between their relationship with no party taking offence or interpreting the comment as hate speech. The company notes to have quite an improvement with this feature and have shown 34% success in people getting false anti-bullying prompts. This is not a very high number to be proud of but this functionality in itself is impossible to achieve 100% accuracy as it is subjective in nature with multiple interpretable factors.
Twitter has become a very popular and widely used platform all across the globe and this power of networking that the micro-blogging site provides to these people can cause massive disastrous outcomes which the company is trying to avoid at all costs.
Twitter is filtering certain offensive words and hate comments in order to reduce hate speech, harassment and bullying on the platform. Healthier conversations are all that is encouraged by Twitter and all of its updates are meant to tackle this serious problem of hate speech on the platform.
