One of Twitter’s biggest hurdles has been the issue to counter the harassment that goes on the platform and today they have announced a slew of changes to remedy that.
Twitter is announcing three new changes that will empower users to report targeted harassment: safer search results, stopping the creation of new abusive accounts and collapsing potentially abusive/low quality tweets.
First, they will stop the creating of new abusive accounts. Most trolls after being suspended by Twitter end up opening new accounts so Twitter will now take steps to identify these people. It is unclear how they would do this.
Twitter is also working on a safe search (sounds like the one we have on Google) which will apparently remove tweets that have potentially sensitive content and tweets from blocked and muted accounts.
They are also working on a way to identify and collapse potentially abusive replies from your timeline so that you will only see conversations that are only relevant to you. You can still see the entire list of replies though if you seek it out if you click “show less relevant replies.”
Twitter promised these changes a week ago via a tweetstorm done by the company’s VP of Engineering where they promised to make Twitter a safe place an urgent matter.
The company says that these changes will be rolled out in the coming weeks (specifically the collapsing abusive tweets feature) and they will update us every step of the way. In addition, they will still be listening for feedback so that they can make Twitter a safe place for its users.
