Twitter’s half-truth about its app settings

Bill Ben­nett, a local tech­nol­o­gy jour­nal­ist I respect, tweet­ed a CNN Busi­ness arti­cle about Twit­ter’s overzeal­ous algo­rithm.

That arti­cle quot­ed a Twit­ter spokesper­son:

… We will con­tin­ue to work to improve our efforts here, and peo­ple always have the option of turn­ing off our cura­tion if they just want to see con­tent from the peo­ple they fol­low.

This quote is sketchy and only half-true.

The oth­er half-truth, which this Twit­ter spokesper­son did not say, is that although you can turn off cura­tion, on the phone app Twit­ter turns it back on with­in a few days with­out your con­sent. The set­tings on my web app are untouched though, which is like­ly what this well-mean­ing spokesper­son has quot­ed.

If you real­ly want to improve your efforts here, Twit­ter, stop chang­ing your users’ app set­tings and start respect­ing their pref­er­ences.

And def­i­nite­ly edu­cate your spokesper­son with your phone app’s hid­den fea­tures as well, so they can share accu­rate infor­ma­tion about your plat­form.