Twitter: Collaboration With Trusted Partners

Twitter is regularly working to improve the health of the public conversations on the platform. It is committed to reach beyond virtual walls to integrate diverse perspectives which will make Twitter’s services better for everyone. This is also the reason why Twitter regularly collaborates with its Trust and Safety Council to develop products and programs, and to improve the Twitter Rules. Let’s have a look at Twitter’s continued collaboration with trusted partners and the work that has been accomplished with these trusted partners.

Incorporating feedback to make Twitter safer

Throughout 2021, Twitter has engaged with the Trust and Safety Council on thirteen projects early in the development process. The council’s feedback was looked through and put to use in a way that offered a better and safer experience for all the Twitter users. Here’s what Twitter wrote on their official blog regarding the feedback informing Twitter’s approach on several products (Source: Twitter Blog)

Communities: We incorporated feedback on the need to manage expectations on the role that moderators play by limiting the number of responsibilities and building tools to help them manage potential harassment.
Tips: We incorporated feedback on the need to emphasise that the people on our service are responsible for transactions in a user-friendly way by asking people to agree to terms of service when enabling the feature.
Safety Mode: To mitigate the effect on limiting counter-speech, a concern raised by the council particularly for people in positions of power, we decided to automatically time out interventions for seven days.
Conversation settings: We started testing a notification that reminds people they can change who can reply to their Tweets to increase awareness and adoption as a direct recommendation from the council.

As a trusted partner, Centre for Social Research, India says, “Twitter has become an extremely important communication tool in India, and it is encouraging to see Twitter take active interest and respond to the feedback given by council members. We’re happy to be part of a team of trusted partners which gets heard and is able to make Twitter a safer platform for all, especially women.“

Twitter’s Approach

When it comes to Twitter’s approach, transparency is their core focus. Which is why Twitter continues to support third-party research about what’s happening on the platform through initiatives such as open developer platform, information operations archive, and the disclosures in the Twitter Transparency Center and Lumen. Twitter will continue to build on these efforts and even inform the public as it improves the platform. The following are highlights from last year as listed by Twitter.

Twitter API for Academic Research: In early 2021, Twitter launched a dedicated Academic Research product track on the new Twitter API giving qualified researchers access to the entire history of public conversation and elevated access to real-time data for free.

Algorithmic bias bounty challenge: Twitter introduced the industry’s first algorithmic bias bounty competition to draw on the global ethical AI community’s knowledge of the unintended harms of saliency algorithms to expand its own understanding and to reward the people doing work in this field.
Twitter Moderation Research Consortium (TMRC): Twitter announced the creation of a new global expert group of academics, members of civil societies and NGOs, and journalists to study platform governance issues.
Launch of an API curriculum: “Getting started with the Twitter API for Academic Research” is now being used at universities, enabling students and teachers to learn how to use Twitter data for academic research.
Creation of a Developer Platform Academic Research advisory board: A group of 12 scholars who began working with Twitter’s team for better understanding of the use of the Twitter API for academic research.
Developer research highlights: Twitter published key research areas which its teams are working on today.