Moderate the conversation on social platforms it is not easy at all. Because of this Twitter ask for help from external programmers: will suggest third party apps to prevent harassment. An experiment that aims to provide users with additional tools, when blocking or silencing a harasser is not enough.
Twitter against harassment, also thanks to third-party apps
In recent days, Twitter has been absorbed in the headlines for financial matters. Elon Musk wants to buy the platform. And he does it by saying that the goal becomes to make it a platform with the more absolute freedom of speech.
But in the daily reality of the platform unfortunately there are cases in which social tools become weapons capable of harass and make users feel uncomfortable. The company already puts it into practice some functions to prevent this type of episode. Users have the option of mute tweets from particularly annoying people can block them and prevent them from tagging them in discussions they want to exclude themselves from.
But some outside services provide more aggressive services to block harassers. Block Party automatically blocks accounts that can become sources of harassment. Bodyguard automatically moderates the replies to your tweets e Moderate helps manage mentions. All tools that Twitter will start to suggest internally.
A more complete service
These tools were already available. But users had to research them and figure out how to implement them. The result was that if celebrities and institutional accounts used them thanks to the intuition of their social media managers, most of the users didn’t even know them.
But now Twitter will suggest them in the app and on the site, on the same screen where he suggests ways to block and silence offenders.
In addition to marking an attempt to limit harassment and improve moderation on the platform, Twitter shows that it will reopen your platform to third-party apps. L‘company told TechCrunch that it could soon pave the way for other types of services, not just related to moderation.
In fact, for some time Twitter has launched the so-called Twitter Toolbox, a collection of services to be added to the app to improve some features. An attempt to expand its service and make it become a real ecosystem, with several developer companies closely linked with the company.
For the moment there are apps like Chirr App e Buffer to schedule tweets, or Thread Reader, app that makes it easier to follow threads. And then tools to measure statistics such as ilo, Blackmagic.so, Direcon Inc., Followerwonk e Tweepsmap.
At the moment, however, there are no further details about it. And it remains to be seen whether this strategy will continue if ownership of the company changes. We will keep you posted.