The Changing Features of Communication on Twitter

Up next in this AoIR 2015 session is Sava Saheli Singh, whose focus is on subverting social media. Our use of such social media, such as Twitter, is shaped by the biases built-in by the people who design these spaces; and these have changed over time. Users reinterpret and repurpose the features of social media spaces, so there is a constant struggle between platform providers and users.

In academic communities and elsewhere, there is a common use of Twitter called subtweeting: speaking about someone behind their back in as anonymous a way as to maintain plausible deniability; the same can happen even more easily by using private Twitter accounts whose tweets are not publicly visible. And blocking and unblocking can be used further to shape information flows between accounts; blocking and immediately unblocking is used to simply cause a follower to unfollow.

Then there's the 'detweet' – the deletion of one's tweets because of typos, errors, or inappropriate statements. This can disrupt the visibility of past conversations, and makes them seem one-sided. Some services that retained deleted tweets, such as Undetweetable or Politwoops (for politicians), have subsequently been shut down by Twitter.

Promoted tweets (Twitter ads) are often annoying, offensive, or even triggering; they are pushed to specific audiences and tend to disrupt the user experience. Trolls have used this to distribute offensive and racist content, in a number of cases.

@mentions of others can trigger harassment and Twitter fights, while Storify is generally used to capture Twitter conversations but can also be used to distort conversations and thus be utilised as a form of abuse.

Retweets are very common on Twitter and have gone through a wide range of permutations, from manual RTs and MTs through the retweet button and the embedded retweet. Such changes have considerable impacts on user behaviours, as they behave differently in alerting the retweeted used to the fact that they have been retweeted. Negative comments via retweets can now no longer be made easily without the target of the comment knowing about it, although some users have taken to tweeting screenshots of others' tweets.

Favouriting is yet another form of engaging with other tweets, and is used variously for bookmarking, for Facebook-style liking, for triggering external actions (for example via IFTTT), and for many other uses; favourites are also triggered by Twitter's 'While You Were Away' page that shows older tweets to users as they log in again.

Any such tools can be subverted and abused, and add messiness (desired and undesired) to the data collected about the uses of such platforms. We must take into account the constantly shifting ground that is determined by how people use these features. As Twitter keeps changing these features, our experience will continue to change, too.