Twitter has announced new measures to eliminate fake profiles, offensive and low-quality news from search results
Just a week has passed since Jack Dorsey's promise - CEO of Twitter - of greater security within its social network, and today the announcement of a series of countermeasures to mercilessly fight fake accounts, hoaxes and messages that glorify violence, hatred and bullying.
Twitter, perhaps a little late compared to Facebook and Google, has decided to make its platform safer and more "credible" with rules that ensure greater authenticity and quality of both content and users who frequent the social network, launching a new strategy that is divided into three moves. The first is to prevent users already excluded from Twitter from re-entering with a new account on the social network. Second is the addition of a secure search that will remove tweets with inappropriate words, phrases or images from search results. And, ultimately, obscure "poor quality" replies that appear in users' conversations.
It won't be possible to sign up for Twitter a second time
The priority, then, is to prevent previously "banned" users from reappearing on Twitter. The social network has a point: the first move to counteract the fake is just to flush out these abusive, these fake accounts and so-called trolls that are, after all, anonymous that - after all - post tweets or comments without putting, so to speak, the "face". Twitter didn't go into details about how it will track down these fake profiles and how to prevent them from reappearing on the platform precisely to avoid giving them valuable details on how to fool the system. But a spokesperson reported that Twitter will use a system partly made up of human reviewers and partly machine learning algorithms to keep them away for good.
Safer Search
Another new feature, again designed to make Twitter a more enjoyable environment, is the new "safe search" feature that can be turned on or off by the user. The results, by default, will be filtered so that inappropriate content, images and videos such as those of poor quality, sexually explicit, or that convey falsehoods or hate messages, will not appear. The search engine will also make sure that tweets from accounts that are no longer followed or that have been blocked will disappear from a given user's results.
On Twitter, conversations will be monitored
Last but not least, is the appearance of a new button that will allow the user to hide unwelcome comments. But, upstream, there is already a prior check by Twitter that will make all potentially poor quality responses in a conversation disappear even in light of the account from which it comes. Suspicious accounts usually have few or even no followers, and the algorithms consider them, therefore, less important than other users who instead interact, follow and regularly post higher quality content.