Weekly Business News Review Class ID: 1092 ETP FD56 Name: 曾亦歆 Josephine
Date:20210507
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57004794
Twitter tells users to be nice and think twice before replying
Twitter will now prompt users to review and revise “potentially harmful or offensive”
replies. The social media platform, which has often faced criticism over abusive user
behaviors, tested the feature last year. Twitter said the tests showed that the
prompts reduced offensive replies. On Wednesday, the company said it would roll
the prompts out to English language accounts using Twitter on Apple and Android.
In a blog post, Twitter said they had found that prompts led 34% of people to revise
their initial reply or to decide against sending their reply at all. Users composed, on
average, 11% fewer offensive replies after being prompted for the first time, Twitter
said. They were also less likely to receive offensive and harmful replies back. It
seems, however, that you can still swear at your friends. Twitter said the prompts are
designed to consider the nature of the relationship between the accounts that
tweets and the account that replies. “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 blog post said.
Platforms target user behaviors
Tech platforms have grappled in recent years with how to police offensive content,
abuse and harassment on their platforms. Twitter’s most recent statistics, for January
to June last year, show that the platform removed potentially offensive content
posted by 1.9 million accounts, and suspended 925,700 accounts for violating Twitter
rules. The debate over content moderation has recently become more intense,
because of decisions taken by social media giants against public officials, particularly
former US President Donald Trump.
Mr. Trump was banned from a number of platforms, including Twitter and Facebook,