Twitter Inc. moved to fix two longstanding user complaints Wednesday, announcing a way to report bots and fake accounts, and testing a button to easily show a user’s feed in chronological order.
“Sometimes you want to see the latest Tweets, first. We’re testing a way for you to make it easier to switch your timeline between the latest and top Tweets,” Twitter said on its official account late Wednesday. While the test will run on a “small number” of Apple Inc. AAPL, +2.61% iOS devices for now, it will eventually be tested on Android devices as well, Twitter TWTR, +2.63% said.
The default algorithmic timeline that shows “best” tweets first, out of chronological order, had vexed some users since Twitter switched to it in 2016. In September, Twitter allowed users to make their timeline strictly chronological by adjusting a setting, but the new tweak will make that option much more visible.
“We want to make it easier to toggle between seeing the latest tweets the top tweets. So we’re experimenting with making this a top-level switch rather than buried in the settings,” Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter’s head of product, tweeted.
Separately, earlier in the day Twitter announced it has updated its reporting procedure to specify “suspicious or spam” content.
“Activity that attempts to manipulate or disrupt Twitter’s service is not allowed. We remove this when we see it,” the Twitter Safety account said in a tweet. “You can now specify what type of spam you’re seeing when you report, including fake accounts.”
Twitter, along with Facebook Inc. FB, +3.81% , has been used for Russian disinformation campaigns, and has been criticized for not properly dealing with bots and fake accounts. Earlier this year, Twitter cleaned house and reportedly suspended 70 million accounts for suspicious activity.
In its quarterly earnings report last week, Twitter said it lost 9 million users over the period, a larger-than-expected decline. But revenue continued to grow, as the company’s ad sales exceeded expectations.
Twitter shares are up almost 45% this year, compared to the S&P 500’s SPX, +1.09% 1.4% gain.
