Twitter_locked_cropTwitter is expanding the terms and tools at its disposal to help users feel safe on the service.

Today, Twitter announced policy changes, a new tool — the ability to temporarily lock accounts suspected of abuse — and a nascent feature “to help us identify suspected abusive Tweets and limit their reach.”

“We believe that users must feel safe on Twitter in order to fully express themselves,” writes Twitter Director of Product Management Shreyas Doshi in the blog post explaining the new policy and product updates. For one, the violent threats policy is being expanded from only covering “direct, specific threats” to “threats of violence against others or promot[ing] violence against others.”

Twitter also is introducing the option for the company to lock abusive accounts for defined periods of time, allowing what Doshi describes as, “leverage in a variety of contexts, particularly where multiple users begin harassing a particular person or group of people.”

And that new way to automatically identify what may be abusive tweets? “This feature takes into account a wide range of signals and context that frequently correlates with abuse,” Doshi explains, “including the age of the account itself, and the similarity of a Tweet to other content that our safety team has in the past independently determined to be abusive.” Notably, Twitter says the feature being tested does not consider if the tweeted content on its own “is controversial or unpopular.”

Twitter has taken multiple steps over the past several months to crack down on abuse and harassment on the service as it simultaneously tries to increase its use and broaden its appeal.

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