In the never-ending fight against abusive content on social media, Twitter is going on the offensive.
The site announced several new safety features on Wednesday morning, expanding its “mute” feature that allows users to block certain content from their notifications. In addition to muting words and phrases from notifications, you can now also block accounts with the default “egg” photo or ones that haven’t confirmed an email or phone number.
Ideally, this will lower abuse by making it slightly more work for people to set up fake accounts.
With the new features, you will also be able to mute content from your timeline and choose how long it is muted. For example, if your friend is account is on a tweet storm, you might want to mute them for one day as opposed to indefinitely. Users can now choose between muting content for a day, a week, a month or indefinitely.
Ed Ho, Twitter’s vice president of engineering, said in a blog post that those new features developed out of user requests.
Twitter also announced plans to improve policing of abusive accounts. The site will take a more proactive stance with abuse, using an algorithm to identify accounts violating Twitter policies and limit their functionality. During these time-outs, only a user’s followers will only see their tweets.
Previously, action was only taken against abusive accounts that had been reported. While the new algorithm will make Twitter more hands-on, it also could incorrectly identify an account as abusive.
“We aim to only act on accounts when we’re confident, based on our algorithms, that their behavior is abusive,” Ho wrote. “Since these tools are new we will sometimes make mistakes, but know that we are actively working to improve and iterate on them everyday.”
Finally, Twitter will also make the reporting process for abusive accounts more transparent. The site will notify users that it has received their report and if any action is taken as a result.
Wednesday’s announcement is part of series of policy changes Twitter is making regarding abuse. The social media has seen an increase in hate speech in recent months, and listed abusive content as a risk factor on its latest annual report. In his blog post, Ho said Twitter is now working “faster than ever” to make it a safer place.
The latest updates will be rolled out globally in the coming days and weeks, and Ho wrote that users can expect more changes soon.
