Twitter Will Measure Echo Chambers and Unruly Comments on Service

Twitter is working with researchers on ways to measure the health of discourse on the social network, part of a broader effort to clean up its service, according to Bloomberg.

Academics, led by researchers at Leiden University, will develop metrics to assess the extent to which people acknowledge and engage with diverse viewpoints on Twitter, the company wrote in a blog post. A second set of metrics will try to spot incivility and intolerance. The team will develop algorithms that aim to distinguish between incivility, which can play an important role in political dialogue, and intolerance, like hate speech and racism, that’s “threatening to democracy,“ Twitter said.

“If we are going to effectively evaluate and address some of the most difficult challenges arising on social media, academic researchers and tech companies will need to work together much more closely,“ Rebekah Tromble, assistant professor of political science at Leiden University, said in Twitter’s statement.

Twitter has also chosen to work with researchers at the University of Oxford and the University of Amsterdam to study how people use Twitter. “Communication between people from different backgrounds is one of the best ways to decrease prejudice and discrimination,“ Miles Hewstone, professor of social psychology at Oxford, said in the post. “We’re aiming to investigate how this understanding can be used to measure the health of conversations on Twitter, and whether the effects of positive online interaction carry across to the offline world.“