Twitter will encourage users to review replies with harmful or offensive language

Twitter often comes under fire from government institutions and human rights activist groups for not doing enough to tackle abusive or offensive tweets. However, the micro-blogging site now seems to be taking a major step toward curbing potential harmful replies on Twitter.

According to leaker Mukul Sharma, Twitter is testing a new feature that will encourage users to review replies with potentially harmful or offensive language. To be more specific, Twitter will give an edit button to remove words that may hurt sentiments or promote bullying.

While the implementation and its documentation is not public yet, it will likely identify and label some of the words as offensive and will inform respondents accordingly. However, users will be able to send feedback to the micro-blogging site if they think their replies are not offensive.

What Twitter is trying to do here is that it's taking a more proactive approach towards curbing social media abuses. Instead of deleting tweets that contain abusive language, Twitter will encourage users not to post them in the first place. A more robust way of discouraging offensive replies would have been displaying a warning stating that tweeting certain type of abusive language could even land users in prison.

Twitter is also testing an edit button for the authors of Tweets, aiming to let people fix their typos even after publishing their tweets. It's more of a curative approach.

Another useful capability may show the Like/Dislike button on the Twitter Notifications areas, giving users an option to like or downvote any tweets directly from the Notifications section.

Notably, Twitter has been testing the downvote button with select users for the last few months, but the company clarified that it wouldn't allow the public to see the dislike counts. It's strictly for the purpose of helping Twitter understand what type of content users want to see.

Twitter is now extending the same capability to Notifications, but it won't be limited to giving you the option to like or dislike tweets. It will do more than that, as Twitter is also working hard to allow users to view stats such as counts for likes, retweets, and replies directly from the Notifications section.

Twitter is testing the aforementioned new features with select users, and it's unclear when, or if, they will roll out publicly.