Twitter announced on Tuesday (November 15, 2015) new ways for its users to control online abuse, bullying, and harassment in the platform.
In a Twitter blog post, the company wrote that they will expand the existing mute feature to notifications, which already allows users to mute accounts they don’t want to see. With the expansion, Twitter users are now allowed to mute keywords, phrases, and entire conversations in their notifications.
In addition, Twitter said that they will give users a more direct way to report abusive content that targets people based on “race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease.” This new feature will go alongside Twitter’s existing hateful conduct policy.
Finally, Twitter announced that they have retrained their support teams on their policies, so they would be better in enforcing Twitter’s policies on hateful conduct.
Nonetheless, Twitter doesn’t expect bullying to stop immediately.
“We don’t expect these announcements to suddenly remove abusive conduct from Twitter. No single action by us would do that. Instead we commit to rapidly improving Twitter based on everything we observe and learn,” Twitter wrote.
(Photo Source: brand.twitter.com)
