Twitter working with scholars to incite 'Healthy Conversation'

Twitter is actually working with researchers from multiples universities in order to know how to encourage a “healthy conversation” with openness and civility.

This situation comes after negative criticism over Facebook and Twitter impact on politics after the US 2016 presidential election. In the aftermath, Twitter has doubled their efforts to clean it up from fake accounts and bots.

Brian Solis, analyst at Altimeter group, says that the bot is one of the major problems in the Twitter sphere, and that it create chaos and angst. Accounts are checked and deleted if the users cannot prove they are humans.

Twitter’s new project with academics is to “measure conversational health” with two aspects: understanding how groups are formed from political views in Twitter and know if users exposed to various views can help them lower discrimination and prejudice. Participation from Syracuse University, Delft University, Bocconi University and Leiden University will measure the formation of groups and challenges faced by them.

Miles Hewstone from Oxford University said that exposure to different background is one of the way to reduce prejudice and investigates whether or not the effects of this exposure can be beneficial offline.