Twitter has finally added the much needed tools to stop abuse and improve user experience

Twitter has rolled out a number of new features designed to stop the abuse by trolls on the platform. These features are designed to improve the user experience while using the platform. It was a persisting complaint by Twitter users that the company is not doing anything about other users who break rules, abuse and troll others on the platform. A previous report about Ghost blocking seems like a limited testing of the newly announced functionality.

The company detailed the steps it is taking to solve the problem in a blog post on Twitter . This comes right after the previous efforts by the company where it improve the search results, ability to block or mute abusive trolls on the platform along with reducing notifications from people they have blocked or muted.

The first thing that the company is working on is to take use of algorithms to identify accounts that are engaged in abusive behavior, behavior that is not even reported to the company. The company will limit account functionality for such users if they continue to repeat a pattern of tweeting at non-followers or engaging in other abusive behavior which is in violation of the Twitter Rules. Twitter confirmed that it won’t mass flag accounts but instead it will only act on accounts it is confident about.

Twitter has added additional filter options where you can specify the type of accounts you don’t want notifications from including the accounts that you don’t follow, don’t have a profile image except the default egg image, don’t have a confirmed email ID or don’t have a confirmed phone number. This would in theory work best for spam or bot accounts made by services or softwares that don’t have verified email or verified phone numbers in addition to the egg profile images.

The company has brought back the ability to mute words that will let you remove keywords, phrases, conversations or even usernames. Twitter gives you the option to mute these words from your timeline, notifications in addition to advanced filter settings that hides those words from everyone on Twitter or just the people you don’t follow. The feature gives you an option to specify the amount of time you want the word to be muted ranging from 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days to forever.

Twitter is serious about these changes has it has introduced a new feature along with all these tools. This new feature notifies the users about the content they have reported to Twitter. Twitter sends them a notification when they receive the reports of harassment in addition to any action that Twitter takes about those reports. This information will be visible in the notifications tab. The company is also working to improve the reporting process for reporting abusive behaviour.

The company pointed out that it may make some mistakes but it is focused to improve the tools. All these features have started rolling out and gradually will be available to users globally in all the languages. Twitter also acknowledged the fact that technology won’t help much, but good online behaviour will.