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What The Twitter Quality Filter Actually Does

You’re here because you want to know alllll of the things about the twitter quality filter. What is it? How does it work? And how does it impact what tweets get visibility?

Twitter’s  “quality filter” promises to limit the visibility of different types of tweets, including “content that appears to be automated.”

For the millions of people automating their updates using scheduling tools, that might seem…a little alarming.

Great Disturbance in the Force

But don’t worry!

Twitter’s quality filter is actually a good thing – like, a REALLY good thing.

(Even if you automate your tweets.)

To understand why, let’s take a look at what exactly this thing even is – and what it isn’t.

It’s all about the twitter notifications

One of the great things about Twitter is that you can reach out to literally anyone you want. All it takes is an @-mention in your tweet, and they’ll be notified that you’re talking about them – they might even reply!

teigen-blender

(RIP Chrissy Teigen’s twitter account!)

One of the WORST things about Twitter, though, is that you can be reached by literally anyone. All it takes is an @-mention in their tweet, and you’ll be notified that they’re talking about you – even if they’re not saying something particularly nice.

In the past, this has made Twitter a convenient tool for harassing public figures – a place where anyone could easily and anonymously flood someone’s notifications tab with whatever brand of hate speech they so desired. It’s a problem that’s affected everyone from comedians and cartoonists to Olympic athletes, and with little intervention from Twitter itself.

Until now, anyway.

Twitter is finally addressing its ongoing issues with accessibility and abuse, and it’s doing so in two parts.

First, Twitter introduced new notifications settings.

These settings allow you to decide who you see notifications from – specifically, it allows you to restrict your notifications to users who you follow.

(That way, if people you don’t follow @-mention you, it won’t show up in your notifications.)

I don't know her

This is a relatively strict guideline, though – after all, you might not want to suspend notifications from every single person you don’t already follow on Twitter.

That’s where the quality filter comes in.

The quality filter also limits what you see in your notifications, but it isn’t quite as ruthless. You’ll still be able to see notifications from people you don’t already follow – just with a few restrictions thrown in.

If a marketing bot tweets the same automated message at you over and over, for example, it might get filtered out of your notifications. Same with the randos who send the same trolling comments every day – or the ones who seem to like you just a little too much.

twitter quality filter

Basically, the quality filter is a way to keep low-quality and/or automated mentions out of your notifications tab.

The quality filter does NOT, however, affect content from any of the accounts you follow.

It also doesn’t filter content from accounts you’ve recently interacted with, either, so it essentially doesn’t prevent you from seeing any of the content it knows you actually care about.

What the Twitter quality filter means for what you post

That’s what all this means for someone using the quality filter – but what does it mean for you and the tweets you share?

Probably nothing.

Unless you’re an actual social media harassment enthusiast – and we’re gonna go ahead and assume that you aren’t – this shouldn’t affect you or your visibility very much at all.

Remember, your visibility won’t be affected at all for people who follow you – and aside from the occasional tailored suggestion, a person’s Twitter timeline is pretty much only people they follow.

If someone doesn’t follow you, and they have the quality filter turned on, and you frequently @-mention them in the same automated post over and over, then that specific post might not show in their notifications tab every time.

(It’s not exactly a huge loss.)

These tools are designed to curb harassment by limiting the number of notifications people receive under very specific circumstances – NOT to stop your tweets from showing up for the people who follow you.

So what are your thoughts? Does this sound like a sensible solution to Twitter’s harassment problem? (Did the way Twitter initially announced it make it sound kind of scary and confusing? Because that’s been a thing in the past, too.)

Share your thoughts on the new features in the comments below!

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14 Comments
  • k9gardner

    Since this post was made over a year ago – i.e. prior to the general election which put Trump in the White House – I have to reflect on it a bit. I wouldn’t in the past have called myself a “social media harassment enthusiast,” until we had the charlatan Tweeter-in-Chief in office. Then I – along with many in the #Resistance movement – probably became social media harassment enthusiasts. And we’re not likely to stop.

    So I wonder, are we being ineffective? Can you dig deeper into how the algorithm works, or will we have to search and experiment elsewhere? If I call the president a charlatan or a buffoon in a tweet, I assume it will go through. If however i call him an a-hole or some other choice words, does this mean it will NOT go through? And we are just talking about email notifications here, or whether the tweets will actually show up in people’s feeds?

    • Tom VanBuren

      In this case, we’re talking about notifications that show up in a user’s notifications tab in Twitter – and depending on a user’s account settings, they may or may not receive emails alerting them to those notifications. In the case of a public figure like this one, though, who is potentially being @-mentioned thousands of times per day, it’s very unlikely that they have their notifications connected to email.

      Similarly, public figures who are being @-mentioned as frequently as Donald Trump very well may limit their notifications to accounts that they themselves follow, as a way of filtering out everything except what they would consider to be the most relevant mentions. Donald Trump has a well-documented habit of blocking his critics on Twitter, which would reflect that criticism of him there does not completely escape his notice — the obvious flip side to that, of course, being that those accounts are frequently blocked.

      Trump is also particularly selective about who he listens to on Twitter – as of this moment, he follows only 45 users. That being the case, it’s reasonable to speculate that, like many Twitter users, he discovers new content by searching for hashtags that appeal to his interests. In September 2017, for example, when he retweeted a doctored GIF depicting himself hitting Hillary Clinton in the back with a golf ball, he didn’t appear to follow the vocally anti-Semitic user who created it – but the original Tweet had been hashtagged with “#CrookedHillary.”

      All of this is to say that the Twitter habits of public figures are extraordinarily difficult to predict, as is the likelihood that they will happen to discover or otherwise see a Tweet mentioning them or one of their interests – and if anything, this is especially true for the user in the example you’ve given. With that in mind, Twitter is arguably a less effective avenue for expressing your political disapproval in a way that the president will notice than, say, contacting your local representatives.

  • My gut instinct is with jenrgy – it’s a shame that abusers of the network make things less open for all of us. Rationally, however, I do wonder how many people will turn it off notifications from those they don’t follow. Possibly a few who are actually being harassed – but most likely they weren’t going to respond to your approach anyway!
    If the quality filter is only going to filter out repeats and constant mentioning of the same people, the actual impact may be very small. I guess we just have to wait and see.

  • Nathan Venturini

    1. If two accounts aren’t following each other and both @-mention each other frequently, will notifications be seen or not seen with the quality filter turned on?

    2. This does nothing to stop spam accounts from the @-mention tweet being sent, only prevents the notification, correct?

    3. Given the half life of a tweet is 2 minutes notification-hidden tweets might as well be dead in the water; however, fair amount of people use TweetDeck and see everything. These settings don’t affect third party programs do they?

    Thank you so much for explaining the filters by the way 🙂

    • Tom VanBuren

      Good questions, Nathan!

      1) Twitter says the quality filter does not affect “accounts you’ve recently interacted with,” so it sounds like those notifications would still show up.
      2) Correct!
      3) Twitter hasn’t said whether or not this will affect notifications appearing in other programs, like social listening tools.

      Hope that helps!

  • What this tells me is that the rich get richer. Almost ever change from Twitter, Facebook and Google over the last couple of years is aimed at helping the big corporate companies and killing the smaller companies. How does this help small businesses and individuals if they need to speak to companies for help/complaints/customer service?

    • Tom VanBuren

      Presumably, companies that use social media as a tool for providing customer service won’t use the quality filter – like you said, it would make it harder for them to do their jobs!

  • jenrgy

    Here’s the thing that has me really bummed. I think this is a very big deal and a fundamental shift. Twitter is special because it is so open. The most open of all the social platform. Unlike any other social channel, we’ve been to communicate with anyone; there needn’t be reciprocity. So if I want to tweet to POTUS, or the Pope, or the fire chief, I can. They needn’t follow me. I don’t have to follow them. But now, if anyone chooses to filter tweets from only those they follow, it changes EVERYTHING. Twitter is now completely different. I understand that this is a way to take away power from trolls and randos, but I’m really bummed about it.

    • Tom VanBuren

      You’re not wrong – that new setting in particular has the potential to cut a lot of people off from their notifications! What’ll be interesting to see is just how many people choose to actually use it, given how restrictive it is – even users who typically get a lot of notifications might be turned off by the idea of ONLY seeing them from people they already follow.

    • Amanda Haddock

      I completely agree. I’ve made so many quality connections on Twitter because I could reach out to people directly who I thought would be interested in the work our nonprofit does. With these new changes, it’s more like Facebook – but edited. Guess I need to start putting more effort into Instagram.

    • Keith BlakemoreNoble

      I can see both sides, and I definitely understand why Twitter now offer this – in basic terms, it has been shown time and time again that the collective “we” can not yet be trusted with totally unfiltered unfettered “access” to everyone. There ARE far too many trolls “out there” who bait and attack some folks on a daily, if not hourly, basis.
      It is hard to imagine what it must be like for some whose notifications tab rapidly hits thousands every time they tweet something! Does render it pointless, really, for them. So for people in that situation, being able to only be notified when you are mentioned by someone you are following makes a lot of sense.

      Realistically, it doesn’t stop each of us from tweeting our favourite celebrity or musician or politician or scientist or whoever, we have in those cases pretty much the same chance of our specific tweet being read, when you think about it.

      If anything, it actually increases the effectiveness of Twitter as a networking medium.
      Think about it. Instead of just tweeting a random tweet to the POTUS and hoping (s)he reads it (which is what most do now), if one really wishes ones tweets to come to that person’s notice, one needs to find a way to get it in front of them. Which would most likely be for it to appear in their notifications. Which means it needs to be retweeted or responded to by one of their contacts. So, how does one get to connect with THAT contact in order to increase the chance of one’s tweet being read by POTUS…
      And so it goes.

      This new approach by Twitter doesn’t really reduce the likelihood of our individual tweets being read by the celeb at which they are targeted (because those chances are generally infinitesimally small anyway); in fact, if CAN, for the person prepared to work at it, actually INCREASE those chances!
      And it reduces the amount of spam / trolling posts they tend to have to wade through.

    • Claire Elizabeth

      Yeah, I’ve gotta agree with you on that ???? The fact that it is so open is what I love too, it’s pretty awesome that you can just connect with so many different people all over the world in just a few clicks! ????

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