Casey Newton, The Verge, May 15, 2018

Twitter will begin using a wider range of signals to rank tweets in conversations and searches, hiding more replies that are likely to be abusive, the company said today. Comments from users that have often been blocked, muted, or reported for abuse will be less visible throughout the service, CEO Jack Dorsey told a group of reporters. {snip}

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Twitter will now begin examining a much wider variety of signals when ranking tweets in conversations and in search, Dorsey said. Some of those signals include number of accounts created by the person tweeting, IP address, and whether the tweet had led people to block the person tweeting it. Twitter won’t remove the tweets from Twitter, it said, but they will now be moved to the “see more replies” section of a conversation, where they are hidden behind an additional tap.

A test of the new approach to ranking found that the number of abuse reports generated from conversations declined by 8 percent, the company said. “The spirit of the thing is, we want to take the burden of the work off the people receiving the abuse or harassment,” Dorsey said.

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At the same time, decisions made by algorithms can also go disastrously awry, and can be difficult for outsiders to understand. {snip}

“We want to take the burden of the work off the people receiving the abuse or harassment.”

The moves are meant to address Twitter’s longstanding struggle to rein in abusive accounts. {snip}

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