Twitter will show you personalized funny tweets

Twitter wants to make it easier for you to see funny tweets. The service is trying out a new personalization feature that aims to surface tweets that fit your sense of humor. The update is part of Twitter’s topics feature, and is specifically part of the “funny tweets” and “viral tweets” topics. While in the past the topics would surface a somewhat random selection of tweets that fall into those categories, Twitter now says it can figure out what tweets you’re likely to find funny based on what you like and retweet.

According to product manager Isabella Turchetta, the new recommendations are powered by a machine learning model that “that understands nuanced emotions by learning from Emojis to get a broader understanding of what people think is funny.” It’s an interesting update for Twitter, which has dabbled in personalized recommendations in the past, though many of its suggestions have been more general, like which accounts or topics to follow, rather than individual tweets.

We also know that humor ranges, so we'll show you a lot of different Tweets starting out. Let us know what you like by liking/RTing the ones you enjoy, and selecting Not Interested on Tweets you don’t. We’ll then show you more Tweets that match what you like.

— Isabella Turchetta (@isabellaturch) December 16, 2020

The update is the latest effort by Twitter to highlight its most viral content, which is often screen-capped and shared to other services (like Instagram meme accounts).The app also recently added a new sharing feature that makes it easier for Snapchat and Instagram users to post tweets to other platforms. By now giving Twitter users a better way to find those tweets, they may be less reliant on other apps (or, at least, spend a little more time on Twitter).