Twitter asks researchers to help make site less toxic

Twitter just began the hardest part of its cleanup effort.

The company announced Monday that it had selected academic partners who will help study "healthy conversation" as part of its ongoing effort to make Twitter less toxic.

The researchers will tackle some of Twitter's toughest problems. One group, led by Leiden University political science professor Dr. Rebekah Tromble, will study echo chambers, "uncivil discourse," and intolerance. The goal, according to Twitter, is to "develop two sets of metrics: how communities form around political discussions on Twitter, and the challenges that may arise as those discussions develop."

The other group of researchers, from the University of Oxford and the University of Amsterdam, will study how people use Twitter more broadly and "how exposure to a variety of perspectives and backgrounds can decrease prejudice and discrimination."

The studies are part of Twitter's sweeping efforts to fight abuse and harassment on its platform. CEO Jack Dorsey announced back in March that the company would seek proposals from independent researchers to study "conversational health."

In addition to the studies, the company has also introduced a series of changes to fight abuse and other factors that contribute to "unhealthy" conversations in recent months. This has included product changes meant to make problematic content less visible, like "behavior-based" ranking signals, as well as a more restrictive developer policy to fight spam and bots.

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But while those changes have made important gains -- Twitter has removed and suspended millions of accounts in 2018 -- they don't really address the fundamental issues that can make Twitter feel toxic to so many people. If the company truly wants to get ahead of abuse and harassment, it needs to do more than simply punish its worst offenders or make abusive tweets less visible.

Which is why Twitter is staking so much on its work with outside researchers. If it can get a handle on how to actually quantify "healthy conversation," then it may finally be able to make more proactive changes rather than just reacting to its worst offenders.

But this also underscores just how challenging the problem is. The company is now seeking to change policies and behaviors that have been in place for years. The research alone will likely be a lengthy process, much less any fix that comes out of it.

So while the new studies are an important step in Twitter's long journey to be better, its hardest problems will still take much longer to fix.