Twitter Changes 2022

While many other social platforms are thriving in 2022 (look no further than the ardent following TikTok now boasts), Twitter has had a bit more of a turbulent year. From coming under fire for facilitating hostile communication, to the whole Elon Musk buy-out fiasco, it’s maybe not been the greatest year for the social platform. Regardless of the struggles its faced, Twitter has looked to continuously develop its functionality by adding a plethora of new user features and algorithm tweaks; while many of these are still in the testing stages or have yet to be see a global roll-out, it’s anticipated that they’ll become commercially available over the coming months.

Super Followers

Even though the Super Follower feature was officially introduced to the world in the last quarter of 2021, the follower monetization service is still only available to select accounts within the US or Canada. In 2022, Twitter streamlined the Super Followers service by incorporating a tab for interaction tracking within the notification panel.

Super Followers is – pretty much – a paywall imposed by prominent accounts that gives subscribers access to ‘higher quality’ content, tweets, or sometimes even direct contact with the author. Available at either $2.99, $4.99, or $9.99, Super Followers is being branded as a “new way for people to earn monthly revenue by sharing subscriber-only content with their followers” and will look to offer creators up to 97% of their total revenue up to a lifetime earning of $50,000, or 80% upward of this value.

Those that will benefit from Super Followers include;

• Small Businesses – can offer discount codes and information on product stock. May be more suited toward niche stores such a those selling records or other collector items.
• Bands – something already replicated within certain applications such as the international music social media platform Weverse, bands can provide information on concerts and offer ticket pre-orders for their more hardcore fans.
• Journalists – be it additional sports analysis, or trending news before it hits the mainstream, journalists can offer industry-specific, tailored information to their followers.
• Celebrities and Influencers – similar to Patreon, celebrities and influencers can use the platform to keep their fans updated with their latest endeavours as well as discussing ideas for content or providing exclusive trailers/samples.

Downvote Testing

Almost every other social media has its own form of expressing a negative opinion toward a post; Facebook reactions, YouTube dislikes, Reddit downvotes, etc. Twitter – for the fact that it definitely has its fair share of controversial content – hasn’t implemented anything of the sort quite yet. in looking to give audiences a funnel to release their frustrations, an early version of the downvote button has now entered testing.

All social platforms have an algorithm in place to distribute popular posts to users it thinks may have an interest in them. Of course, since this is done by a computer rather than a real human, it’s not all that uncommon for a post to get an unprecedented amount of coverage for all the wrong reasons. Many algorithms are notoriously poor at recognising things such as hate speech and you’d be hard pressed to find a Twitter user that hasn’t – at some point – come across a racist, homophobic or sexist tweet recommended on their timeline. In the algorithm’s eyes, the post is getting a high volume of interactions and should therefore be shown to as many people as possible, right? From this point, unless the tweet itself gets blocked (not exactly the most fool-proof system either), it continues to get shared around to people who probably aren’t too keen on its contents.

Unlike many of its competitors, Twitter isn’t looking to make its downvote figures public, but rather to use them as an indicator for its algorithm to recognise tweets that may potentially use hate speech or contain offensive themes. While this is certainly going to take some honing, a downvote button can potentially help mitigate the spread of hurtful tweets and may even contribute to building a case against the blocking of certain users.

Spelling mistakes are a wonderful staple of Twitter, and there’s a certain comedic charm to seeing a multinational corporation forget to double check a tweet before clicking the post button.

The Edit Button

The most requested feature by the Twitter faithful, an edit button has long been a coveted as a change that could really take Twitter to the next level and was one of the features that Elon Musk was pushing for during the early days of the Twitter takeover. Of course, the takeover has all but fallen through, but it has been confirmed that an Edit button is indeed still in development.

Spelling mistakes are a wonderful staple of Twitter, and there’s a certain comedic charm to seeing a multinational corporation forget to double check a tweet before clicking the post button. Twitter themselves state that you should pin the correction in the comments section in order to not lose out on the interaction the post may have already gotten, but this doesn’t really spare the blushes of the author – especially when the mistake gives the entirety of the post a whole new meaning.

While most uses of the edit button would be for innocuous changes such as spelling or grammatical mistakes, there are certainly some dangers that are likely the reasons behind Twitter waiting so long to add it;

• Alterations made after comment have been made could very easily lead to people being taken out of context. Say you put out a tweet reading “Manchester City are the best football team in the world”, your friend Dave could comment “Yes, I agree”; you could now edit your post to say “Liverpool are the best football team in the world” and it suddenly looks like Dave is a proud red.
• In instances where online abuse is reported against a user, they could simply go back and make an edit to their hurtful tweet. Online abuse is incredibly challenging to police and post-live alterations will add another layer of difficulty to this process and make it far more likely for trolls or bullies to get away with hateful speech.
• Something pretty heavily debated in tech circles is the idea of online transparency, Twitter is – at the moment – great for this and you frequently see celebrities caught out for tweets published years ago. While they can be deleted, if saved to someone else’s timeline they can’t be removed without the full deletion of the author account. This ensures that people take responsibility for the things that they post.

From their communication on the matter, it seems that Twitter is very much aware of the potential dangers of an edit button and is currently looking for ways to mitigate these. Very much just a rumour at the moment, it’s been mentioned that edited tweets may have a text extract or key indicating that they’ve been altered, alongside a 30-minute timeframe in which the author can make changes before the tweet is permanent.

Safety Mode

Following the exponential rise of social media usage in 2020 and 2021, Twitter have clearly realised there’s a huge contingent of spammy and abusive tweets/users on their platform. Originally unveiled to select audiences at the end of 2021, Safety Mode makes its way out of Beta testing and to roughly 50% of the English-speaking users across the UK, US, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand.   

For accounts that have safety mode enabled, Twitter will look to automatically block interactions that may be abusive or disruptive in nature. It does so by viewing the content within a message or tweet with AI identifying registered slurs/hateful language; the algorithm also considers the relationship between the sender and the recipient to ensure that it doesn’t accidentally block communication from a followed account or one that the recipient frequently interacts with. Automatic blocking lasts for a total of seven days but will display a notification toward the end of this term to give the user an option to permanently block the account or extend the duration of the ban.  

While the concept behind safety mode is a great one, since all of the blocking is done by the algorithm – you can’t really be sure that it’ll catch all of the spam/abuse. Alternatively, some accounts may also find that completely harmless communication is being blocked on account of Twitter suspecting it might be of a poor quality. Twitter themselves have admitted that they anticipate mistakes in the system and have therefore added a section in the Settings tab from where autoblocks can be undone.

Summary

Overall, Twitter is making considerable changes in 2022. Developments in artificial intelligence as well as the general tech industry have meant that social media platforms have more tools on offer when it comes to refining their user experiences. A lot of the changes look to implement additional security to protect users from the rampant bots and spam accounts that make up a sizeable section of the user base. We have yet to see how effective these changes will be, but from a distance they certainly look like they may help to enhance the platform going into the future.

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