Thread by @JoannaG

My job is to lead Twitter’s Curation team.

“What is a Curation team?!” you ask?

Well, fellow person on Twitter, let me explain:

Most people know that social media companies have moderators that review and may take down content on their platform.

(🚨 Spoiler alert: that’s not what our team does 🚨)

What you might not know is that a lot of those companies also employ people to do the opposite: help find and uplift great/useful content they think people want to see.

And that’s Curation’s role at Twitter. We help find and showcase great, contextual, engaging Tweets -making it easier to both find big conversations and understand them better when you do.

Compared to moderation we are a smallish (but mighty!) team, with 75 people around the world monitoring Twitter 24/7 and curating for 16 markets in 5 languages (and translating Tweets from many more).

You can see most of our work in the Explore tab (the one with the magnifying glass). We’re probably most well known for @TwitterMoments but you might also catch a
live video stream highlighted by us, or a push notification.

In the future, they’ll be more ways we help out too.

“Isn’t this work best done by algorithms?!” I hear you ask.

Short answer: not really!

Long answer: Complex heuristics and machine learning algos have a hugely important part to play in how content is distributed on any social media platform. They always will. Unlike humans they can scale really well and social feeds wouldn’t work without them.

But some important things - e.g choosing things that explain (and don’t just provide a hot take about) what’s happening; compiling a narrative; judging the impact of a conversation; deciding the ethical/cultural context of a Tweet - are still better done by skilled humans.

Our work is always going to be a mix of algorithms and humans - an ongoing assessment and balancing between precision and recall needs en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision…

So that’s us! Curation is a team that works quickly to contextualise a massive variety of different conversations at every hour of every day. It’s not an easy job.

But we are lucky to have a team of smart, thoughtful, talented, creative folk that take the responsibility of the job very seriously and with whom I am incredibly grateful to work with.

If you want to learn more about us, we recently published our Style Guide - one of the key documents that guides how we think about and approach curating Twitter. You can check it out here: help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-p…

(It’s also available on github here: github.com/twitter/curati…)

I love this area of work and believe what we do is shaping how tech companies think about info distribution. So feel free to ask me questions!

(Oh and if you have a non-curation query I haven’t replied, please check out my thread here:

https://twitter.com/joannag/status/1057439561452638211?s=21

Also, we're hiring!

We're looking for a curator to join our team in Tokyo: careers.twitter.com/en/work-for-tw…

And we've got a role for a data scientist interested in helping us better understand the impact of curation and content on Twitter: careers.twitter.com/en/work-for-tw…

#jobs