Twitter’s Latest Changes Finally Do Something To Combat Online Abuse

Twitter will now notify you when it’s received your report and when it decides whether or not it’ll take further action. The company has of late begun taking things into consideration finally with a slew of new updates since the end of past year to tackle its biggest problems.

You’ll now be able to mute specific words – including other usernames – from your timeline, not just your notifications. This past November, users were able to “mute” certain keywords, phrases, or entire conversations.

As noted by a few users last month, Twitter has been putting some users in a “timeout”, meaning that for 12 hours only their followers can see their tweets. If an account is repeatedly tweeting at non-followers without solicitation, for instance, Twitter may make it so that only the tweeter’s followers can see their tweets for a certain amount of time.

Twitter announced on Wednesday that it will use algorithms to spot potentially abusive accounts – another step the company has taken recently to tackle complaints of harassment, hate speech and other abusive behavior on the popular social media site.

Twitter also revealed it will now use its algorithms to more actively identify accounts that spread abusive content. By forcing users to upload photos and verify phone numbers and email addresses if they hope to be seen by their targets, Twitter is making would-be harassers do a little more work when they create new troll accounts.

Twitter has moved to take stronger action against abuse on its platform in recent months after it came under fire for its response to behaviour of users. There isn’t a process to appeal any of the the penalties yet, though Twitter’s plan to “iterate every day” indicates that may change.

The changes include increased automatic screening for abusive tweets, more powerful filtering options for users and greater transparency from Twitter about how it’s dealing with abusive accounts.

Twitter (TWTR) has announced three new updates to its safety policies that should allow site administrators to quickly respond to abusive accounts even before they’ve been reported.

Twitter also is looking to communicate more with people who report abuse. “This will all be visible in your notifications tab on our app”.

Harassment and abuse on the platform also reportedly played a role in why Disney and Salesforce did not pursue a bid to acquire the tech firm, which has struggled to hit Wall Street’s expectations. Let us know in the comments.