T witter Limits and Facebook Quality
Here’s the news we’re talking about around the Zbra Studios water cooler. We’ve provided key bullet points from each article for the speed readers out there.
Twitter Is Going To Limit The Visibility Of Tweets From People Behaving Badly
By Alex Kantrowitz from BuzzFeed
- On Tuesday, Twitter announced a massive change to the way its conversations will work, evaluating not just the content of individual tweets, but the way users behave more broadly on the service. Twitter will now use thousands of behavioral signals when filtering search, replies, and algorithmic recommendations.
- The push is meant to get out ahead of problems that might normally result in an abuse report under the existing system. In testing, Twitter said the changes led to an 8% drop in abuse reports on conversations (the discussions that happen in the replies to a tweet) and a 4% drop in abuse reports in search.
- The company believes these changes can be effective, particularly because they can be applied globally, without regard for language, since they are entirely action based.
How Facebook Wants To Improve The Quality Of Your News Feed
An interview by Nicholas Tompson From Wired
Key Takeaways:
- John Hegeman: There’s a strong correlation between the people who are posting things like false news, and people who are violating these other types of policies.
- Tessa Lyons: If you’re constantly posting clickbait, because you’re trying to drive people off of Facebook to your website, we use those predictions to help reduce the distribution that content gets in News Feed.
- Michael McNally: With clickbait, we define what it is as a policy statement. And then we have raters look at large volumes of material, and they label it as clickbait or not. And then we have deep neural networks that do, indeed, train on the text itself and learn the patterns. We also look at things like social connections or user behavior or things that aren’t in the text itself, but they all become part of the predictive model. And so that gives us the probability that something’s clickbait.
- Dan Zigmond.: Two billion people around the world are counting on us to fix this, and that would be true regardless of what happened in the last election, and so this is something that’s very important to us and that I think we’re going to be working on for a very long time.
Nick Cotton is a project manager based out of Los Angeles, California. He’s got a background in the entertainment industry, and uses his talent at online messaging to extol the virtues of content marketing, interactive fiction and sentences measuring 280 characters or less.
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