Social media giant Twitter has expanded the test of its “downvote” system worldwide. The company claims that downvotes will be used to “surface the most relevant replies within Tweets.”
The Verge reports that Twitter has expanded its “downvote” system worldwide as it continues to test the effectiveness of the feature. The feature entered a testing phase last year, but is now being expanded globally, the company has said.
We've been testing how we can surface the most relevant replies within Tweets with the use of downvoting on replies. As we're expanding the experiment to a global audience, we want to share a little about what we have learned thus far!
👇 https://t.co/wM0CpwRgo6— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) February 3, 2022
The downvote system was rolled out to a select group of users to begin with, but the feature will be expanded to iOS and Android users also. The downvote system is similar to the voting system used on the self-proclaimed “front page of the internet,” Reddit. Unlike Reddit, however, Twitter’s downvote count on a tweet is not public.
Twitter said that so far testing has found that users downvoted replies they found offensive or irrelevant. The company stated: “This experiment also revealed that downvoting is the most frequently used way for people to flag content they don’t want to see.” Critics consider it yet another crowdsourced censorship tool for a platform that has taken numerous steps to censor conservatives and people with the audacity to post basic biology such as the difference between men and women.
So far, Twitter believes that the downvote system “improves the quality of conversations on Twitter,” which could mean that the feature will be rolled out across the site in the future.
Read more at the Verge here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
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