If you’ve ever tweeted something innocuous that went on to kick off a firestorm of unwanted attention, you know full well that people on Twitter will fight about anything and everything — it’s the internet’s premier destination for high-speed, low-information opinion slinging, after all.
Twitter has been working on ways to tone down the toxicity that the platform is known for, and the latest experiment primes people with a few pointers before they wade into messy tweet-fights. Users may see the test prompts appear on Twitter’s iOS and Android apps.
The company says the idea is to give people a heads up if they’re about to join a conversation that’s “heated or intense” which on Twitter could be anything from life-threatening health misinformation to guacamole recipes. Twitter says the goal, as it has stated before, is to foster “healthy conversation” on the platform.
The test labels appear under a tweet and display a little warning that “conversations like this can be intense.” To participate, it looks like you’ll need to click through a prompt encouraging users to be factual, open to diverse perspectives and reminding them of their shared humanity.
Twitter has tested other behavior-shaping prompts previously, including pop-ups that discouraged users from sending hate and harassment in replies. Targeted pop-ups are clearly a tool that shows promise for slowing some rapid-fire toxic social media patterns, though given the scope of people being monstrous assholes online, we’re going to need a lot of different solutions.
Source Link Twitter is testing prompts that warn you when a conversation has bad vibes
