Commentary: Twitter Tests Upvote & Downvote Actions

LOS ANGELES — Twitter is testing a new way to interact with posts you do or don’t like.This year, earlier in June, Twitter has announced that it would start testing a new feature to work on the quality of the tweets exchanged on the platform. Inspired by Reddit, Twitter has decided to explore the possibilities of upvoting and downvoting the replies posted on a tweet. With this new feature, the platform gives the possibility to the users to judge if a comment is valuable or not. The ascending ranking automatic filter should then display the most relevant (most upvoted) comment on the top of the other replies. Since yesterday, the platform has extended its testing pool to a larger amount of users. According to the company, this new tool has been developed to “understand the types of replies you find relevant in a convo, so we can work on ways to show more of them.” Currently, the downvotes are not public and the upvotes appear as a simple “like." The micro-blogging company said that this test was only for purpose research, meaning that in the end, we might not see it live in the future.In 2021, Twitter counts 206 million monetizable daily active users. The company is one of the very few powerful social media platforms that still tolerate adult businesses and content. Such a quality-control feature shows a will to improve the service for the users and eventually fight misuse of the platform. The amount of counter-productive comments such as trolling, spamming and fake news messages not only increase the noise pollution on the platform but also hurts the social user experience that should be based on information, educational, entertaining and/or playful exchanges between the users.