Twitter rolls out a new report a tweet interface
Well, that’s one very useful update alright. It totally blows the old Report Tweet interface out of the water. In fact, the old interface to report a tweet was quite limited in terms of what options you get to describe the issue when you’re reporting someone’s offensive blabber. On top of that, it focused on making you figuring out what rule of Twitter the person was violating.
The old Report Tweet
Well, not anymore. The new update that the social media giant is now rolling out makes reporting a tweet an easier and more streamlined experience. First off, it eliminates the need for you to figure out which Twitter policy the tweet in question is violating. Interestingly enough, many offensive tweets fall into a grey area in regards to Twitter’s policies. Now, the new Report Tweet flow allows you to first describe the issue in a few steps (and more details!), and then presents you with a rule that the tweet in question would seem to be breaking. Of course, if the AI turns out to be incorrect, you can always opt for choosing another rule that was broken by the tweet.
Twitter stated that it had worked with different designers and researchers to create this new report a tweet flow. On top of that, Twitter plans to use the data from these reports to identify more trends and categories of harassment and spam on the platform.
The update is now available on Twitter for iOS, for Android, and on the web version.
This is, in fact, not the first time we are seeing this reporting flow. It ran as a limited test in the US last December (as we mentioned above), and the outcome of the exercise was great. The test resulted in an increase in the number of actionable reports by a staggering 50%, and Twitter removed more tweets violating its rules.
This update comes at a rather strange time for the company. As you may have heard, Twitter is in the middle of an acquisition deal with multi-billionaire Elon Musk. Right now, the deal is paused because of Musk’s concerns over the disclosed percentage of fake accounts on Twitter, but his view on content moderation might be a bit different than the current Twitter policy. With the future of the deal being unclear at the moment, we are not entirely certain of the future of Twitter moderation either. For now, all we have to do is to be patient and wait for the outcome.
