Twitter’s New Anti-Harassment Strategy Uses Algorithms, Targets Egg Avatars And Expands Mute

Twitter has set out an outright war against anti-harassment this year where we have seen several updates like this one being done this year. They are not done yet and Twitter’s VP of Engineering, Ed Ho revealed a slew of new updates that show the company’s commitment to this cause.

Using algorithms to weed out abusive content

Twitter will now identify accounts that are engaging in abusive behaviour even though it was not reported to them. These accounts will be punished by being limiting their content to be seen by only their followers. If they continue to violate their rules, they will take further action.

In addition, Twitter will use their algorithms to identify these perpetrators and will act on these accounts if they are confident that the behavior is abusive. However they admitted that it could make a mistake and promised to work on them.

Mute feature gets new capabilities and new tools for notifications

They have now added more filter options for your notifications where you will be able to sort out accounts by their unverified email addresses, egg avatars or by phone numbers. This will allow you to make sure that people who interact with you are genuine and not hiding from phony accounts.

Twitter made an overdue update to the mute button where you could mute keywords or phrases from your notifications.In this new update, you will be able to mute content from your timeline for either a day, week, month or indefinitely. This is actually one of the biggest requests made by users and it is great they will roll it out.

Extras

Twitter will notify you when they receive a report from you about harassment claims on your account or someone’s account. These will appear on your notifications.

They also promise to “improve the transparency and openness” of their reporting process where we will hear more from them about accounts or tweets you reported.