Bulletins

Twitter wants to flag 'heated' or 'intense' conversations

"This is a work in progress as we learn how to better support healthy conversation," the company wrote in a tweet.

Twitter

Twitter is testing a new feature that will tell you if a conversation is "heated" or "intense."

Photo: Joshua Hoehne/Unsplash

Twitter announced Wednesday it is testing a feature that will alert users that a conversation could be "heated" or "intense." In a tweet, the company described the experiment as "a work in progress as we learn how to better support healthy conversation."

Twitter has introduced and tested a range of features intended to try to help users have a more positive experience on the site, including a prompt that asks users if they want to read articles before retweeting them and a new setting called "Safety Mode" that temporarily blocks accounts for seven days that may have used harmful language (if the user opts for that setting).

Twitter did not specify in this case how it will determine whether conversations or posts could qualify as either heated or intense, and how it will evaluate the success of the test. "This is the first exploration into more context about a conversation's vibes, so you can be informed before you join. This is a small limited experiment on iOS and Android and we will be learning and iterating as we monitor the results of the initial experiment," a Twitter spokesperson wrote in a statement to Protocol.

Anna Kramer

Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (Twitter: @ anna_c_kramer, email: akramer@protocol.com), where she writes about labor and workplace issues. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.

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Bulletins