Twitter Moves to Encourage Better Behavior

After facing a barrage of criticism over the toxicity of its community, Twitter announced last month that it will try to more actively measure and combat bad behavior, with input from outside researchers. CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted that the company has partnered with an outside team, led by researchers Susan Benesch and J. Nathan Matias, to run a test, starting today, the Verge reported. “Research has shown that when institutions publish rules clearly, people are more likely to follow them,” the researchers wrote in an announcement. With that in mind, the researchers will test whether making users more aware of the rules will promote civil discussion on Twitter. The exact mechanism of the test is not clear. The researchers write that they “cannot describe it in detail now without jeopardizing the integrity of the results,” but say they received approval from two university ethics committees, and filed the outline of the plan with a neutral third party. They will work only with anonymized data.