Product

How recommendations help you discover more on Twitter

By
Tuesday, 20 September 2022

Twitter is always working to make it easier for you to discover the conversations and accounts that interest you the most. Recommendations are one of the ways we do that. 

If you’ve ever seen a Tweet you enjoyed from someone you didn’t follow, you’ve probably seen a recommendation. Think of them as personalized suggestions that are shown to you based on actions you take on Twitter.

Recommendations are designed to enrich your Twitter experience, and the more you know about them, the better they can be. In fact, we’ve put together a whole Help Center article detailing what types of content we recommend, where recommendations appear, and how you can control them (definitely worth a read).

If you’re pressed for time, however, here’s the tl;dr on recommendations and how we’re working to improve them.

How and where Twitter recommends content

The content we recommend to you is informed by actions you take on Twitter, also known as signals.

Signals can include things like interests you’ve told us about, Topics you follow, Tweets you engage with, and even Tweets people in your network like. Based on these signals and more, we’ll show you content we think you’ll be interested in. 

Recommendations can appear in your Home timeline, certain places within the Explore tab, and elsewhere on Twitter.

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Maintaining a high standard for recommendations

Because recommended content doesn’t always come from people and accounts you follow, we work to surface conversations that are relevant, healthy, and authentic.

Our recommendations team partners closely with our Health, Trust & Safety, and Machine Learning Ethics teams to make sure we’re recommending high-quality content. You can read more about our standards for recommendations in the Help Center article linked above. 

Controlling your recommendations

In addition to improving the quality of our recommendations, we also provide tools to manage recommendations and clear ways to tell us when we do and don’t get it right. This is an important part of enabling you to use Twitter on your own terms. 

One of these options is the “sparkle icon”  ✨ located at the top right corner of your Home timeline. This lets you toggle between seeing top "For You" Tweets, which include recommendations from accounts and Topics you don’t follow, and "Latest" Tweets from only the accounts you do follow. 

You can also give us feedback on recommendations you see on your Home timeline. For example, liking or Retweeting recommended content will send us a signal that you find it interesting. Selecting “Not interested in this Tweet/Topic” from the Tweet menu, on the other hand, will tell us you’d like to see less of that type of content.

How we’re Improving recommendations

Finding Tweets and accounts you like should feel effortless. That’s why we’re investing in improving the quality of recommendations across Twitter and continuing to explore ways to make them easier to understand and control. 

This includes a new design with an “X” on Tweets making it simple to remove them from your Home timeline and share your feedback with us. We’re also testing new ways to clearly distinguish and switch between your “For You” Home timeline view that includes recommendations and the “Latest” view that doesn’t.

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With millions of people signing up for Twitter every day, we’re also testing new ways for people who are new to our service to tell us more about what they’re interested in. This way we can easily recommend content, accounts, and Topics you truly want to see. 

We’ll continue working to improve the way you discover timely and interesting content on Twitter, and we’ll keep sharing our progress with you along the way.

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