Twitter has announced a crackdown on abuse on its network, unveiling a new filter designed to automatically prevent users from seeing threatening messages.
Every user’s notifications – the timeline of messages directed at them – will be filtered for the first time, in an effort to prevent people from being confronted by abusive messages.
The social media company is also banning indirect threats of violence, and will introduce temporary suspensions for accounts that fall foul of its policies.
Twitter had earlier written a blogpost saying they were updating their policy on dealing with abuse. The blogpost had pointed out that that Twitter will be updating the violent threat policy and that it now “extends to ‘threats of violence against others or promoting violence against others.’
The blog post said, “Our previous policy was unduly narrow and limited our ability to act on certain kinds of threatening behavior. The updated language better describes the range of prohibited content and our intention to act when users step over the line into abuse.”
The quality filter isn’t a radical new tool—it is basically an extension of another feature for verified users called tailored filtering, which let them select an edited version of their notifications timeline based on factors like which other users they had the most interactions with. Quality filter basically extends that functionality to all notification options.
