Twitter Rolling Out New Feature That Filters Abusive Direct Messages

Twitter is releasing a spam and abuse filter for direct messages (DMs) — a much-needed feature for the social media platform.

As Twitter continues to work on developing its private messaging and connection tools, this week, it’s rolling out its new, advanced direct message (DM) filtering process to all users, which will keep you from having to look at those unwanted, unsolicited images and videos that strangers have sent through to your Twitter inbox.

Here’s how it works. The filter adds an additional view to the DM requests in the inbox. Nested inside the “message requests” option is a category that will contain “additional messages” which will house those messages that have been flagged as offensive. From there, the recipient can either choose to delete the messages without ever opening them.

You can see exactly how the new feature works in the GIF posted by the Twitter Support account above. It’s important to note that the DM requests will still arrive, and all of them can be accessed easily should you want to. And you’ll still receive a DM notification, too. Oh, and this is only going to work with the official Twitter app. Third-party apps are a no-go, at least for now.

If you have open DMs, Twitter still hasn’t stopped random people who you don’t follow  from adding you to DM groups. This can be frustrating, because you either have to deal with spam or browse message requests to make sure you’re socialising outside your followers. This also leaves people open to spam and promotional messages.

Twitter is also piloting a “Hide replies’ feature in Canada and US, wherein it allows users to hide unwanted replies so they’re not visible to everyone. The tweets aren’t removed, but simply placed behind another click.

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