Twitter seeks help of academic scholars to improve healthy conversation on its platform

Source: Xinhua | 2018-07-31

The world's top social media operator Twitter said Monday that it has launched two projects led by academic researchers to help measure the health of conversations across its platform.

Twitter said it is partnership with scholars from Leiden University, Syracuse University, Delft University of Technology and Bocconi University to focus on two different issues -- the effects of echo chambers and "uncivil discourse," and how to promote user interaction with diversified viewpoints.

The first project led by Leiden scholars will primarily focus on the two key challenges of echo chambers and uncivil discourse.

The researchers will examine how the effect of echo chambers, where people only with like-minded perspectives and views talk to each other, can increase hostility and promote resentment towards those not having the same conversation.

"The project's first set of metrics will assess the extent to which people acknowledge and engage with diverse viewpoints on Twitter," Twitter said in its official blog post, and the second set of metrics will tackle "incivility and intolerance" in Twitter conversations

The scholars found that although incivility, which breaks norms of politeness ad can be problematic, it can also serve important functions in political dialog.

However, intolerant discourse including hate speech, racism, and xenophobia will threaten democracy, and the team will develop algorithms to distinguish between these two behaviors.

Meanwhile, the second project, to be headed by professors from Oxford and the University of Amsterdam, will study how people use Twitter and how exposure to a variety of perspectives and backgrounds can decrease prejudice and discrimination.

"Evidence from social psychology has shown how communication between people from different backgrounds is one of the best ways to decrease prejudice and discrimination, said Miles Hewstone, a professor of Social Psychology at Oxford University.

He said his team will investigate how the metrics 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.

Twitter's announcement came after it was struggling desperately to recover its loss of share values in the past two days after the San Francisco-based company lost 20.5 percent of shares last Friday, when its second-quarter earnings reported the loss of 1 million monthly active users in three months.

The social media giant has also launched a campaign to clean up its platform, including dumping 70 million fake accounts between May and June, in an attempt to fight misinformation and spam behavior in its community.