Twitter is working on improving its awareness of language nuances

Insults and biting jokes are a common practice among some groups of friends. Used in a humorous manner, these words still qualify as insults, especially for Twitter. When it launched a system of alerts against tweets containing language considered aggressive, the platform tended to warn the users responsible for the tweets. However, the platform understood that detecting sarcasm was more complex."

"In early tests, people were sometimes prompted unnecessarily because the algorithms powering the prompts struggled to capture the nuance in many conversations and often didn't differentiate between potentially offensive language, sarcasm, and friendly banter," Twitter outlined on its blog.

Twitter claims that its system now better recognizes the difference between aggressive language and friendly colloquialisms, thanks to "improvement to our technology to more accurately detect strong language, including profanity."

In addition to analyzing vocabulary, the platform will now focus more attention on the relationships between users, to better distinguish between true friendships and interactions with "trolls," those users who endlessly spew hateful comments. Twitter will be able to determine if a comment is really an insult by analyzing the frequency of conversations between two users, whether they follow each other and whether they respond to each other by tweet on a regular basis to determine the nature of their relationship. "For example, if two accounts follow and reply to each other often, there's a higher likelihood that they have a better understanding of preferred tone of communication," noted the American social network.