Twitter introduces new safety features to prevent trolling
Changes to improve safety and content issues on Twitter will be rolled out from today (27 February), and should reach all users in the coming weeks.
Following changes to Twitter in December, where the major Social media site rolled out a new streamlined process for reporting harassment and ‘blocking’ people, the company are now looking to make similar improvements around reporting other content issues including; impersonations, self-harm and the sharing of private and confidential information.
These new software developments are expected to have reached all Twitter users in the next few weeks.
During the last six months the agency have further overhauled how it reviews user reports about abuse; for example by allowing bystanders to report abuse, something the new product change now allows to be done for reports of private information and impersonation as well. These changes have meant not only an update to the company’s in-product reporting process, but significant changes to its tools, processes and staffing behind the scenes.
Overall Twitter will now review five times as many user reports as it previously did, and it has tripled the size of its support team focused on handling abuse reports.
These investments in tools and people will allow Twitter to handle more reports of abuse with greater efficiency. This will see the company review more reports than ever before. It claims to also have been able to significantly reduce the average response time to a fraction of what it was.
A Twitter spokesperson said; “The safety of our users is extremely important to us. It’s something we continue to work hard to improve. This week’s changes are the latest steps in our long-term approach, and we look forward to bringing you additional developments soon.”
Meanwhile, Twitter will begin to add several new enforcement actions for use against accounts that violate its rules. These new actions will not be visible to the vast majority of rule-abiding Twitter users, however they do give the company new options for acting against the accounts that do not follow the rules and serve to discourage behaviour that goes against Twitter’s policy’s.