Social media can be seen as a central location wherein every single person living in the world is spending their time, and that can be both a bad thing as well as a good thing. While the advent of social media has enabled people to become far more connected than they had ever managed to be prior to this point in history, it should be noted that the anonymity that comes with hiding behind a screen can be something that causes a lot of negativity as well.
Twitter is notorious for being a place where countless aggressive interactions occur, especially when subjects are being discussed that could cause some form of heated debate. Twitter tested out a feature back in May of 2020 that basically sent someone a prompt if the algorithm detected that they were commenting on something that might lead to aggression or rude behavior. While this feature went away during the election season, it came back in 2021, and it has been interesting to see this experiment play out.
With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that Twitter has now released a report that outlines the importance of such features. According to this report, around 31% of users that saw this prompt managed to cool off and write a calmer reply, or in some cases they deleted their replies outright. While a majority of users still went ahead with their hateful comments, 31% is still a pretty massive proportion.
This proves that small measures can sometimes go a long way, and less proactive platforms like Facebook could potentially take a leaf out of Twitter’s playbook because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up allowing them to become much better at handling the kind of hateful rhetoric that has become commonplace among their overall user base. What’s more is that the 70% that left a comment after the prompt might not have been saying something offensive, so the actual success rate might be a lot higher than we are currently able to comprehend.
Read next: Twitter Might Let You Post Long Form Articles In the Future
Twitter is notorious for being a place where countless aggressive interactions occur, especially when subjects are being discussed that could cause some form of heated debate. Twitter tested out a feature back in May of 2020 that basically sent someone a prompt if the algorithm detected that they were commenting on something that might lead to aggression or rude behavior. While this feature went away during the election season, it came back in 2021, and it has been interesting to see this experiment play out.
With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that Twitter has now released a report that outlines the importance of such features. According to this report, around 31% of users that saw this prompt managed to cool off and write a calmer reply, or in some cases they deleted their replies outright. While a majority of users still went ahead with their hateful comments, 31% is still a pretty massive proportion.
This proves that small measures can sometimes go a long way, and less proactive platforms like Facebook could potentially take a leaf out of Twitter’s playbook because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up allowing them to become much better at handling the kind of hateful rhetoric that has become commonplace among their overall user base. What’s more is that the 70% that left a comment after the prompt might not have been saying something offensive, so the actual success rate might be a lot higher than we are currently able to comprehend.
Read next: Twitter Might Let You Post Long Form Articles In the Future