Back in November last year, Twitter announced new anti-abuse features to give people more control over what they see when using the service. Building on those foundations, the company also introduced more ways for people experiencing targeted harassment to report the abusive behavior.
In a blog post today, Ed Ho, VP of Engineering at Twitter, reiterated that the company won"t tolerate abuse and harassment, and announced three more changes to combat trolls on the service. These changes span from account creation to search results and low-quality Tweets filtering.
The first change aims at people who have been permanently suspended and continue to create new Twitter accounts. The main goal here is to stop the creation of accounts that are only used to abuse and harass other users.
The second change is directed at search results, and removes tweets that host potentially sensitive content. Dubbed by the company as "safe search", this will also remove content published by blocked and muted accounts from the user"s search results. Of course this content can still be found viaother means, and the changes are detailed at Twitter"s Help Center.
The third change is focused on the Home feed, where potentially abusive or low-quality tweets will be aggregated inside a collapsed section. The main goal here is to keep the most relevant conversations highlighted, while the other replies can be accessed elsewhere.
Finally, Ho has stated those changes will become available in the coming weeks and hinted at more product changes for the future, some to be more visible than others. The changes will arrive gradually so the engineers can improve the algorithm with each iteration and make a significant impact in the long term.
Source: Twitter Blog via MIT Technology Review | Image via flickr