14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter introduced a new set of changes to reduce harassment on its platform, something that has long been waited by users as abuse seems to reach new heights every day.
The company announced the introduction of several new changes. One of them is for users who report abusive tweets or accounts to get some feedback on their reports, something that doesn't really happen.
First, users will see a notification confirming their report has been received. If Twitter decides to take action against an individual or a particular tweet, following their report, users will be able to see some follow-up notifications. If nothing happens, you won't get any message about it.
The changes, the company said, will be rolling out in the next few weeks, so it might take a bit before they reach you, depending on where you live.
This is Twitter's answer to all those complaints from people who had no idea whether their reports lead to any type of action. On top of helping out with people's curiosity over what happened with said reports, this measure also helps users achieve a new level of trust in the platform as they'll finally be able to see their opinions matter.
Ignore the trolls
Another new feature that Twitter said is coming soon is the ability to hide tweets from eggs, namely those accounts that haven't even bothered uploading a profile picture. The same will be possible for accounts that have not been linked to a verified phone number or email address.
This is something that was highly necessary on Twitter, given how people would create temporary email addresses just to make a new Twitter account to harass someone online without taking any kind of responsibility for it.
Twitter's Ed Ho, VP of Engineering, further went into detail about how the new "timeout" feature works. If you don't know, this prevents accounts from tweeting at non-followers for a period of time. For instance, he says, if an account is repeatedly tweeting without solicitation at non-followers or engaging in patterns of abusive behavior, they'll be put in timeout because this would be considered a violation of Twitter's Rules.
"We aim to only act on accounts when we’re confident, based on our algorithms, that their behavior is abusive. Since these tools are new we will sometimes make mistakes, but know that we are actively working to improve and iterate on them everyday," he adds.