In response to ongoing criticism that the company hasn’t been doing enough to curb harassment on its website, Twitter has today announced on its official blog that it is rolling out new tools to address hate speech and online abuse. The social media firm notes that it has noticed a growing trend of people taking advantage of its platforms’ openness and using it to be abusive to others.
The amount of abuse, bullying, and harassment we’ve seen across the Internet has risen sharply over the past few years. These behaviors inhibit people from participating on Twitter, or anywhere.
Because Twitter happens in public and in real-time, we’ve had some challenges keeping up with and curbing abusive conduct. We took a step back to reset and take a new approach, find and focus on the most critical needs, and rapidly improve. There are three areas we’re focused on, and happy to announce progress around today: controls, reporting, and enforcement.
Twitter says that it is expanding its “mute” function, which until now has only been used for keeping individual Twitter users out of your stream. “We’re expanding mute to where people need it the most: in notifications. We’re enabling you to mute keywords, phrases, and even entire conversations you don’t want to see notifications about, rolling out to everyone in the coming days”.
The company also highlights that it has re-trained internal support teams, which are responsible for enforcing Twitter’s code of conduct and investigating reports of violations. Furthermore, Twitter said it is also working on giving users a more direct way to report hateful conduct.
To read the full announcement, click here.
