Social media has converted the world into a global village, however, at the same time, it has brought a lot of trolls, foul language and abuse our way. Where companies like Twitter and Facebook are responsible for filtering such content, they have often turned a blind eye towards these issues in the past. Facebook has since improved the situation somewhat, but Twitter didn’t change much, until now.
Last year in September Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, promised an increase in healthy public conversations on the platform. At that time, this statement looked like something someone would say in spur of the moment but recently, Twitter has been seen working on this new agenda.
It has devised an algorithm for filtering out abusive content and trolls, which has been making meaningful progress according to the company. They do claim the algorithm is in its initial stages and has a long way to go but they have shared some statistics that prove the algorithm is doing a good job.
Initial Results
So far, Twitter has removed 39 percent of abusive content based on the algorithm. Previously, Twitter only focused on user reports for filtering out the data. Apart from that, more than 100,000 new accounts were suspended on account of popular troll tactics of opening fake accounts. They have also caught and put down users involved in private information sharing which is against Twitter rules.
The company has not disclosed the exact numbers, only percentages, which are promising but we have no idea how much there is left to deal with on the field. Since the amount of verbal abuse on Twitter is massive, we are not sure even if the algorithm is properly working.
