Twitter ranking algorithm updated to deal with harassment, abuse

In a bid towards tackling their everpresent woes of failing to deal with harassment, abusive behaviour and objectionable content, Twitter ranking algorithm is receiving a new update.

A lot of social media platforms continue to battle the demons of objectionable content, harassment and abusive behaviour but none face this particular predicament like Twitter does. The microblogging platform has faced incessant criticism for their failure to arrest abusive tweets and online harassment in the past and CEO Jack Dorsey believes that changes to the Twitter ranking algorithm will finally bring about the change that was so desperately needed.

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“A lot of our past action has been content-based, and we are shifting more and more to conduct,” Jack Dorsey told The Guardian.

Twitter will now begin to rank tweets based on much more comprehensive and interactive data such as the number of accounts registered to the particular user, whether a spam or hateful tweet inspired people to block, or mute the account and the IP address among other determinants. Upon finding a tweet to be of poor quality based on these parameters, Twitter will not delete them but will relegate it to the ‘Show More Replies’ section. Verified email addresses and other factors too will come into play.

While many would scoff, Twitter swears by their new update, claiming to have witnessed an 8% decline in abuse reports on conversations that received a test of the new feature.

While Twitter’s contemporaries Facebook, Instagram and YouTube among others face similar problems, none of them suffer the same degree of trouble as Twitter. It’s open and real-time nature makes it impossible for Twitter to even consider human moderators like Facebook in the past, or YouTube recently did for their YouTube Kids platform after objectionable content appeared to have slipped through their watch.

Although Twitter has been working on fixing this nuisance consistently, none of their efforts have had a significant impact which they would certainly hope to change with the new update.

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