Building on anti-harassment tools announced in November, Twitter is now “trying to shake its reputation as a haven for online harassment” with still more new internal algorithms and features, reports CNN. An anonymous reader quotes their report:
The changes include preventing serial abusers from creating new accounts, a new “safe search” function and blocking potentially abusive and “low-quality” tweets from appearing in conversations, Twitter’s engineering chief Ed Ho said in a blog post. Twitter is working on identifying users that have been permanently suspended and prevent them from creating new accounts, Ho said. This new measure specifically targets “accounts that are created only to abuse and harass others,” he said, a problem that has long plagued the platform.
The new safe search function prevents tweets that are abusive, or from blocked and muted accounts, from appearing in users’ search results. Those tweets can still be found if people want to see them, but they “won’t clutter search results any longer,” Ho said. And Twitter will now collapse tweet replies that are potentially abusive or low quality — like duplicate tweets or content that appears to be automated. But those tweets “will still be accessible to those who seek them out,” Ho said.
The blog post announces Twitter’s ultimate goal is “a significant impact that people can feel,” arguing that freedom of speech for all viewpoints is “put in jeopardy when abuse and harassment stifle and silence those voices.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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