A Study Shows Twitter Prompts do Change the Behavior of Users

The famous social media platform Twitter has announced the success of an experiment that encourages users to reevaluate tweets that can be harmful or insulting, claiming that asking people to be kind on Twitter makes them nicer.

With the question “Want to review this before tweeting?” the social network has been attempting to persuade users to be more considerate of others since 2020. It does this by algorithmically identifying posts that seem aggressive and prompting users to think twice before sending them.

A Study Shows Twitter Prompts do Change the Behavior of Users

In a paper co-authored with Matthew Katsaros of Yale Law School, Twitter researchers claim that the prompts do in fact work to make a change in behavior and that the change remains around long after the suggestion was displayed.

While elaborating on the matter, a Twitter researcher said,

We found that out of every 100 tweets where users were prompted to reconsider, the following actions were taken: 69 were sent without revision; 9 were canceled; [and] 22 were revised. Of those 22 revisions, only one was rewritten to be made more offensive, and more than a third were redrafted to be more palatable.

The impact goes beyond just the initial tweet. This indicates that suggestions may make users more aware of avoiding potentially objectionable information when they submit subsequent tweets, the researchers wrote. “This signifies a larger and durable shift in user behavior.”

Reducing a user’s output of harmful tweets also decreases the number of those tweets they receive, which is a win-win situation. Furthermore, the social media platform also assisted the users in improving their own quality of life by urging them to reconsider unfriendly behaviors.

Social media analysts lauded the experiment’s success. According to Ryan Broderick, editor of the Garbage Day newsletter and internet culture reporter,

It turns out that if you do even the bare minimum you can sizeably reduce how horrible Twitter users treat each other.

Check out? Twitter Confuses Users by Reversing the Copy Link and Bookmark Buttons