Trolls on the internet are a problem because sometimes they steer the conversation to somewhere else detract from the main point entirely. More often than not it is done to rile other people up for no good reason other than for fun. Twitter has been battling abusive behavior on its platform for a while now, and they might have a new approach.According to Twitter, “What we’re talking about today are troll-like behaviors that distort and detract from the public conversation on Twitter, particularly in communal areas like conversations and search. Some of these accounts and Tweets violate our policies, and, in those cases, we take action on them. Others don’t but are behaving in ways that distort the conversation.”
So how will Twitter deal with this? Basically Twitter’s algorithms will now take into account a greater variety of data. For example it will look at how many accounts are registered to that particular user, if they constantly tweet and mention accounts that don’t follow them, or if they might have been blocked by some users, and so on.
According to Twitter, based on their testing using this new approach, they have found that there is a drop of 4% in abuse reports from search and 8% drop in reports from conversations. Twitter admits that their work is far from done but hopefully these changes will result in a more positive user experience.
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