In March, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey pointed to four main indicators of 'conversational health' on any public platform. The indicators, prepared by the analytics firm Cortico and MIT's Laboratory for Social Machines, are shared attention, shared reality, variety of opinion, and receptivity. These indicators reflect some of the biggest criticisms to emerge of public platforms in the aftermath of the polarizing US presidential elections in 2016. On Tuesday, Twitter announced in a blog post that it would be filtering certain tweets and accounts in conversations and search results. The tweets that will be filtered, the company says, "don't [violate our policies], but are behaving in ways that distort the conversation." That essentially refers to trolls. Just 1% of handles accounts for a majority of those that users have reported for abuse. While these users aren't typically bots or aren't behaving in any specific ToS-violating way, Twitter says that they harm the health of public conversations, as measured by Cortico's indicators. By filtering these tweets out by default — they're still visible under "See more tweets", and not deleted — Twitter reported a 4–8% drop in abuse reports from users. How 'trolls' are flagged Twitter said that it would use automation to flag accounts that fit certain patterns and filter tweets by those handles out by default. These indicators include not having a verified email address, tweeting at handles that don't follow them and creating multiple accounts simultaneously. "Because this content doesn’t violate our policies, it will remain on Twitter," the company said.…
