From The Verge: Twitter says more than 50 percent of tweets identified as abusive are now being flagged by its automated moderation tools first and taken down before a user reports them. Improvements in its machine learning model for identifying problematic tweets enabled the faster moderation, Twitter said.
Cracking down on abusive tweets has been an ongoing goal of Twitter’s. The company regularly talks about how “one of our highest priorities is to improve the health of the public conversation on Twitter,” as its earnings letter says today. Ongoing abuse has made Twitter an unpleasant place to be for many longtime and highly active users, so its ability to cut down on bad actors is important to the site’s usage and user growth.
Twitter says its automated flagging has grown from 43 percent of all abusive tweets last quarter and 38 percent the quarter before that. To be clear: this doesn’t represent every single abusive tweet on Twitter, just the ones that Twitter has ultimately removed as abusive. A problematic tweet that Twitter either missed or ultimately chose not to remove wouldn’t count, while a tweet that was mistakenly removed as abuse would.
Those are important caveats, but Twitter would at least like us to think that these numbers represent an overall improvement in moderation. Twitter says that it’s also been sending more flagged tweets to human moderators for review and that reviews have been happening “more proactively and faster than before.” More abusive content was taken down in total, too.
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