Twitter is getting help from academic researches to improve it's 'health'. 

The move is intended to catch and dissuade toxic and offensive behaviour on the platform.

On Monday, the company announced that it is going to be receiving help from a number of academic researchers to monitor and study how users behave when exchanging tweets and talking about political topics.

For a long time, Twitter has been dealing with users posting offensive comments on the its service and this has led to criticism that the company is failing to deal with the issue of bullying and online harassment.

Dealing with it

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has been working on a grand plan to create a set of metrics that the company can use to determine the 'health' of conversations that are occuring on the Twitter platform.

Several public comments have been made by Dorsey regarding Twitter’s plans to diminish bad behaviour over the past year, coinciding with increasing criticism towards some of the tech industry’s biggest companies, including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

The group of researchers, fronted by Dr. Rebekah Tromble, assistant political scientist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, will assist Twitter to study how users form communities centered around political topics.

Further research teams from the University of Oxford and the University of Amsterdam will work alongside Twitter to learn “how exposure to a variety of perspectives and backgrounds can increase prejudice and discrimination.”

The hope is that if users are exposed to a wider spectrum of voices from people that don’t share their beliefs, they will be less likely to send offensive, hurtful and threatening comments to others.

This isn’t the first time Twitter has made moves to decrease conflict on the platform. Earlier in the year it partnered with non-profit Cortico to help Twitter create a potential framework that could “help encourage more healthy debate, conversations and critical thinking.”