Twitter removes half of abusive tweets before users report them
Twitter removes half of abusive tweets before users report them. More than 50% of abusive tweets are being flagged by Twitter’s automated moderation tool. Then taken down before users even reports it. Twitter said that improvements to the machine learning model enables faster moderation. The machine used for identifying problematic tweets.
“One of our highest priorities is to improve the health of the public conversation on Twitter,” as stated in its earnings letter. For active users, abuse has made twitter an unpleasant place. Cutting down on this is important to the site’s usage and user growth.
Twitter says its automated flagging has grown from 38% in the second quarter and 48% in the third quarter. This represents tweets Twitter has removed as abusive, not all abusive tweets. More abusive content was taken down in total. As more flagged tweets are being sent to human moderators for reviews which are “more proactively and faster than before.”
Twitter knows this isn’t just enough and acknowledges it has more work to do. Twitter’s goal is to reduce “the burden on victims of abuse” and to take “action before abuse is reported.”
The numbers came from Twitter’s latest earnings report, which also shows 6 million new daily users during its third quarter. Now having 145 million daily users which increased from 124 million last year.
These numbers show Twitter is going in the right direction. After the company has been struggling the last couple of years with their user growth. Whilst the daily users have increased, they’re still small. Instagram had 500 million people just using stories daily, and Snapchat now has 210 million daily users.
Twitter profits.
Despite positive numbers, stocks have taken a serious hit. With share prices down almost 20% before the market open. Twitter narrowly missing its guidance. Only reaching $44 million falling from $92 million the same quarter last year. With a revenue of $824 million falling at the bottom of Twitter’s projections.
One fault for the weaker revenue is bugs that limit the ability to target ads and share data with advertisers. Bloomberg reporter Kurt Wagner said that targeting and measuring ads fell significantly. Twitter stopped using users data they may not have been given permission to use for advertising. As it was doing in some cases for around a year. That mistake was disclosed in August.
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