Social media platform Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) continues to expand its offerings to compete with other platforms. The latest rollout involves being able to react negatively to tweets.
What Happened: Twitter is expanding the option to downvote replies to tweets. The votes are not revealed publicly and are used to provide relevant replies to the original tweets.
Twitter said it will roll the feature out globally to iOS and Android users.
Twitter began testing the feature in July 2021 to a select number of users on the iOS app. In testing, Twitter said it was able to weed out offensive and irrelevant responses from appearing at the top of the replies.
“This experiment also revealed that downvoting is the most frequently used way for people to flag content they don’t want to see,” Twitter said.
Related Link: Twitter Q3 Earnings Highlights: 211M Monetizable Users, Ad Revenue Up 41%, Japan Second Largest Market
Why It’s Important: The company said that allowing downvoting improves the quality of conversations on Twitter, something that could hep with growth of active users.
Twitter allows users to mute conversations and flag content as inappropriate or spam. The comment that this is the quickest way could lead to additional changes for the social media platform to moderate its users.
The move by Twitter to allow a way of downvoting that is not public follows other social media platforms.
YouTube, owned by Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG)(NASDAQ:GOOGL) made the decision to remove showing the number of dislikes on a video. Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:FB) has also experimented with having ways for members to dislike posts.
The move by Twitter follows a similar process that Reddit has to upvote and downvote posts. The major difference here is the dislikes are not public. Twitter is using its own users to improve its platform by seeing what is most popular and helpful.
In the world of heavy competition for users on social media, Twitter’s rollout could be well received by its users and investors.
TWTR Price Action: Twitter shares were up 6.19% at $36.61 midday Friday.
