Content Moderation Case Study: Twitter's Self-Deleting Tweets Feature Creates New Moderation Problems
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Summary: In its 15 years as a micro-blogging service, Twitter has given users more characters per tweet, reaction GIFs, multiple UI options, and the occasional random resorting of their timelines.The most recent offering was to give users the option to create posts designed to be swept away by the digital sands of time. Early in 2020, Twitter announced it would be rolling out "Fleets" — self-deleting tweets with a lifespan of only 24 hours. This put Twitter on equal footing with Instagram's "Stories" feature, which allows users to post content with a built-in expiration date.In the initial, limited rollout of Fleets, Twitter reported that the feature showed advantages over the platform's standard offering. Twitter Comms tweeted that initial testing looked promising, stating that it was seeing "less abuse with Fleets" with only a "small percentage" of Fleets being reported each day.Whether this early indicator was a symptom of the limited rollout or users viewing self-deleting abuse as a problem that solves itself, the wider rollout wasn't nearly as easy as earlier indicators nor was it relatively abuse free. Fleet’s full debut arrived in the wake of an incredibly contentious U.S. presidential election — one marred by election interference accusations and a constant barrage of misinformation. The full rollout also came after nearly a year of a worldwide pandemic, which resulted in a constant flow of misinformation across multiple social media platforms globally.While amplification of misinformation contained in Fleets was somewhat tempered by their innate ephemerality, as well as very limited interaction options, it seemed unclear how — or how well — Twitter was handling moderating misinformation spread by the new communication option. Extremism researcher Marc-Andre Argentino was able to send out a series of "fleets" containing misinformation and banned URLS, noting that Twitter only flagged one that asserted a link between the virus and cell phone towers.Samantha Cole reported other Fleet moderation issues. Writing for Motherboard, Cole noted that apparent glitches were allowing users to see Fleets from people they had blocked, as well as Fleets from people who had blocked them. Failing to maintain settings that users set up to block or mute others created more avenues for abuse. Cole also pointed out that users weren't being notified when their tweets were added to Fleets, providing abusive users with another option to harass while the targets of abuse remain unaware.Company Considerations:
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