Yesterday, Twitter announced an update to their anti-harassment tools, which was a welcome move since they have been plagued by this issue for a while now. There are two sides of this issue where you give users the ability to filter what they don’t want to see and on the network side where they handle complaints.
The main tools that help people filter what they don’t want to see on Twitter are the mute and block tools. The blocking tool was not that effective initially since you could block a person and they would still see your tweets in a conversation. Thankfully, Twitter rectified that by pushing an update and they did just that for the mute tool.
Just like the blocking tool, the official muting functionality was rather barebones where you were only able to mute a person to prevent their tweets from showing up on your timeline. However, that was enough since you may have wanted to mute certain keywords, phrases or hashtags and Twitter did exactly that.
The update was released yesterday and today, Kenyans on Twitter started to share screenshots of their list of words and phrases.
This is quite extensive
Thank you @Twitter pic.twitter.com/wdIjMwLOBm
— Brian Mbunde ™ (@Brianmbunde) November 16, 2016
I’m starting to see a trend here.
Finally @twitter brings the MUTE function to the mobile app.
Happy days ahead. 🙌 pic.twitter.com/2S2gm21oIB
— Sinia Kanso 🇰🇪 (@YuriBaraza) November 16, 2016
There seems to be a theme here
Already putting this new feature to good use pic.twitter.com/HVUHg5M1I3
— Kim. 🪳 (@TheKimutai) November 16, 2016
Others decided to mute football related words
Alright guys. I'm in pic.twitter.com/Ywz5etYKoj
— 𝗨𝗡𝗗𝗘𝗥𝗥𝗔𝗧𝗘𝗗 𝗡𝗜𝗡𝗝𝗔 (@iamjoseh_) November 16, 2016
Same case here
Here we go pic.twitter.com/WbegbsDkJb
— 🔴mufc (@_s_h_e_j_i_) November 16, 2016
Some were quick to show that other 3rd party Twitter apps have had the feature for a while now.
https://twitter.com/RNsliq/status/798760684116791296
A point to note is that Twitter specified that the expanded mute feature was for notifications, so you will be able to see these tweets on your timeline. Twitter needs to work on that as we have seen these features on third party apps like Tweetbot for iOS which mutes keywords and phrases from your timeline.
