Twitter seeks suggestions for 'healthy' online content

Amid increasing trolls and abuse on social media, popular micro-blogging site Twitter issued a proposal seeking suggestions from its users on improving the health of content posted online.

In a proposal issued to improve health metrics, Twitter said it aims to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation around the world, and to hold itself publicly accountable towards progress.

"By measuring our contribution to the overall health of the public conversation, we believe we can more holistically approach and measure our impact on the world for years to come. Twitter's health will be built and measured by how we help encourage more healthy debate, conversations, and critical thinking; conversely, abuse, spam and manipulation will detract from it. We are looking to partner with outside experts to help us identify how we measure the health of Twitter, keep us accountable to share our progress with the world and establish a way forward for the long-term," a company blog post read.

Therefore, using an approach inspired by the work of Cortico, a non-profit research organisation, and others on the concept of measuring conversational health, Twitter aims to work with four indicators- shared attention, shared reality, variety of opinion, and receptivity, to identify indicators of conversational health that are specific to Twitter and its impact.

In this regard, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in a series of tweets reiterated Twitter's commitment to eradicate abuse, harassment, trolls, manipulation through bots and misinformation campaigns, to provide users with a platform for global messaging and conversation.

"We didn't fully predict or understand the real-world negative consequences. We aren't proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast enough. We've focused most of our efforts on removing content against our terms, instead of building a systemic framework to help encourage more healthy debate, conversations, and critical thinking. This is the approach we now need," Dorsey said.

"If you want to improve something, you have to be able to measure it. The human body has a number of indicators of overall health, some very simple, like internal temperature. We know how to measure it, and we know some methods to bring it back in balance. However, We don't yet know if those are the right indicators of conversation health for Twitter. What we know is we must commit to a rigorous and independently vetted set of metrics to measure the health of public conversation on Twitter, and share results publicly to benefit all who serve the public conversation," he added.

Twitter seeks proposals by April 13 this year, with contact information, suggested health metrics, anticipated resource requirements and methodology, proposed output, estimated time needed to capture, measure and evaluate health metrics, relevant, peer-reviewed, publications and papers.

The first set of selected projects, Twitter said, will be announced in July.