TwitEtiquette

With the exponential growth of technology in the past few decades, there also has been an increase in the flock of users moving to the online world. The COVID-19 pandemic has further fueled the motion, since social distancing guidelines and lockdown restrictions kept us at home. We all are even more motivated than ever, to move to social media and the online world to keep us company, but also be there for each other and stay connected. Twitter being one of the most used social media platforms. People use it from sharing their day-to-day life, venting and communicating their emotions and ideas, and what not.

The digital world, moreover online media is becoming more and more influential, also leading to a formation of a ‘reflexive’ relationship.  The digital is as much as ‘real’ now. The digital world affects the physical world as much as the vice versa.

Our interactions online can affect the digital as well as the physical world too. Synonymous to our offline behaviour as citizens of our countries, we have certain responsibility being netizens.

Thus, we ask

How good of a netizen are we?   

On researching more about how we can characterize a good netizen as on Twitter. We categorize those parameters into the following: 

1. Exhibiting prosocial behaviour 

2. Following tweeting guidelines and netiquettes

Let’s get into these in detail, shall we? 

Prosocial Behavior 

Prosocial behavior as the name suggests, refers to the voluntary actions that are intended to help or benefit another individual or group. This can be identified online through either presence of this or negation of antisocial behaviour. We used both of these to structure and evaluate prosocial behaviour in our system. 

• Consistent interaction is part of a prosocial characteristic, since engaging with others and the platform is a positive habit and fosters an interactive environment. 
• Cyber-bullying and posting hateful content are antisocial characteristics, so the less they are exhibited by a user, the more prosocial they are online. 

Tweeting Guidelines and Netiquettes 

Tweeting guidelines and netiquettes both include good practices that a user should ideally adopt when interacting on Twitter. Let’s go back to the analogy of us being citizens but also netizens. Similar to the real physical world where a particular citizen consciously adheres to certain etiquettes (for instance traffic rules!), the online world also calls out for good practices that ensure a comfortable and healthy experience for everyone. Twitter etiquette is a lot like the advice your mother gave you when you were young. “Be nice”, “Treat people well and they’ll respond in kind” and so on. It sounds simple enough, but when people are online, the communication flows right at their fingertips without lingering in the brain long enough to consider the longer-term effects.

Proposed solution:

'TwitEtiquette'

TwitEtiquette helps people analyse their own behaviour, so that they make well informed decisions about how they would choose to interact online and/or whom to interact with. 

About TwitEtiquette 

TwitEtiquette is a simple-to-use web tool that can help you know whether the twitter user in question is good, based on their online activity. We generate a final netizen score based on a set of metrics that fall under the bigger categories of prosocial behaviour and netiqeutte compliance. 

TwitEtiquette takes in a username, and displays highlighted metrics along with the score. 

Highlighted metrics of a user

The system also creates a downloadable report which has a detailed analysis of the metrics, and suggests ways the user in question can improve their netizen score.

Report of the user

TwitEtiquette uses the last 500 tweets for analysis. 

List of metrics that TwitEtiquette uses to analyse twitter user’s behaviour and consequently generate a good netizen score are: 

1. Spamming: Check whether someone posts too many tweets and content or not.  
2. Average time interval: It is the average mean of time intervals between consecutive posts. The lower it is, the more interactive the user is on the platform. 
3. Response time interval: It’s the average time taken by a user to reply to tweets. The more the interval is, the more inactive the user is and also indicates impolite behaviour to an extent. 
4. Number of hashtags: Recommended number of hashtags is 3. Any more than three is considered a bad practice. 
5. Capital letters: If the text is present in all caps, it is considered rude. It’s read as someone shouting. So, capital letters should be used only as per need. 
6. Tweet length: This measures the average number of characters in the user’s tweets and also the percentage of tweets that had more than 120 characters. Ideally a tweet should be within 120 characters, so that it’s convenient for the users who retweet to be able to add their own content in the same tweet, and avoids the possibility of them having to post it in another tweet in the thread (which is considered a bad practice). 
7. Cyberbullying: This metric checks for whether the user in question posts or likes content that exhibits cyberbullying. This measures the number of cyberbullying tweets posted or liked by the user. 
8. Hate Speech: This metric checks for whether the user in question posts or likes hate-promoting content. This measures the number of hateful tweets posted or liked by the user.  

List of metrics that help us generate a final netizen score for you

With that we hope TwitEtiquette can assist you and your social circles to engage responsibly and make well-informed choices online. :) 

Until next time :)  

Team TwitEtiquette