Twitter has seen a lot of criticism over the years as the company has repeatedly failed to manage online abuse. The charge has against Twitter has always been that the social site was not doing enough to control the mounting levels of bullying and harassment that users are subjected to.
However, it does seem like the company is now getting really serious about cracking online abuse via new features that will allow users to police the tweets they see. So now a user can block and mute keywords, phrases, usernames, emoji, hashtags or even complete conversations from appearing in push notifications anytime someone is mentioned in a tweet. The company is working on having this option available to all its users in the coming months.
In addition to this, the company has also strengthened reporting and processing of tweets that are in direct violation of its Hateful Conduct Policy. So anytime a user clicks to report a tweet as being “abusive or harmful”, the user will be provided with a list of options that will help document more clearly and specifically how or why the tweet is abusive. Armed with this information the Twitter’s support team will then take a call on how the issues should be handled.
Users can set which text to block through the settings option on the notification tab either via the social sites mobile apps or through the notifications option in the settings tab over its site. If a user wants to block a complete conversation they simply have to pull up an expanded individual tweet from the conversation, click on the arrow facing downwards and then click mute the conversation.
Twitter’s online abuse problem has been growing over the years. What’s to be seen now is how far these new options help Twitter tackle online abuse and trolls. This especially in light of the fact that the social platform has been losing users because of the harassment issue.
