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After all, isn’t there enough evidence already that conversations on Twitter aren’t very healthy?
In March, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a study showing that misinformation is endemic to Twitter. Falsehoods on the service “diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information,” they wrote.
Another recent study found that, contrary to the idea that Twitter is expanding the diversity of voices the public is exposed to, the service has actually turned the political news media into an even more male-dominated echo chamber. Male journalists on Twitter interact almost exclusively with other men — almost 92 percent of their replies are to other men, and they retweet men three times as often as they retweet women.
Nikki Usher, a journalism professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who was the study’s lead author, suggested that there were several ways Twitter could address this disparity, including by providing users with stats on their behavior. She also said that what happened on Twitter had real-world consequences.
