Twitter conducted new research to gauge the effectiveness of its warning prompts on Tweets with potentially offensive replies. Twitter initially released the option back in 2020 and officially ‘relaunched’ it last year, meaning to add another layer of friction and consideration to the overall Tweet process.

Twitter’s warning prompts use automated detection to pick up likely offensive terms and keywords within Tweet replies, triggering this alert to basically “Think Twice” before proceeding.

I Find That Offensive

Back in February, Twitter reported that in 30% of cases where users were shown these prompts, they did end up either deleting or changing their replies to avoid possible misinterpretation or offense. Twitter has since taken a deeper dive into the process, stating that:

“While it was clear that prompts cause people to reconsider their replies, we wanted to know more about what else happens after an individual sees a prompt. To understand this, we conducted a follow-up analysis to look at how prompts influence positive outcomes on Twitter over time. Today, we are publishing a peer-reviewed study of over 200,000 prompts conducted in late 2021. We found that prompts influence positive short and long-term effects on Twitter. We also found that people who are exposed to a prompt are less likely to compose future offensive replies.”

It’s amazing what a mere extra thought between Tweets can do. According to Twitter’s research, for every 100 instances where these prompts are displayed:

  • 69 Tweets were not revised.

  • 9 Tweets were not sent.

  • 22 Were/had revisions.

It becomes more interesting once you start looking at the granular details and how these prompts have begun changing certain user behaviors as a result. However, more than this, Twitter also found that the prompts can have ongoing behavioral impacts within the app. So, while 4% might sound insignificant, the ongoing effect is that users end up becoming more considerate in their responses.

To add, researchers also found that prompted users received fewer offensive replies. Again, while 6% might sound like a small amount, with some 500 million Tweets sent daily, this raw number could be significant. At face value, these results show that Twitter’s offensive reply warnings could serve as an educational tool to guide more consideration, helping to improve on-platform discourse over time.

The Wrap

The bigger takeaway here is that there are ways to help realign user behaviors towards more positive engagement, which could be a key step in reducing division and angst. That’s an interesting consideration for future platform updates in this respect. While expanding such prompts could be difficult, it does show that misunderstandings are a common element in online debate.

The truth is that Twitter isn’t real life and that most of those that you would argue with online aren’t as argumentative in person. People simply love controversy. You can read Twitter’s full study here.

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Sources

https://bit.ly/3zAA0DR