Twitter pushes on in the fight against online abuse

Following the announcements in November about their fight against online abuse, Twitter has announced some new updates on their progress. Starting today the company is pushing out new changes that should help combat the more obvious online abuse patterns.

Twitter’s team is rolling out a few new changes that should be visible to all within the coming weeks. In today’s announcement, Twitter states that they’ll be curbing the creation of abusive accounts, cleaning up search results, and hiding away “low-quality” Tweets. While the latter two don’t permanently remove the content, users won’t be inundated with potentially abusive or offensive content unless they personally choose to show the results.

On the topic of stopping the creation of new abusive accounts, the team mentions that they are going after “people who have been permanently suspended and [will] stop them from creating new accounts.” Ed Ho, Twitter’s VP of Engineering, shared some tweets a few weeks back stating the progress the team is aiming for.

In a tweet reply from January 30th, 2017, Ho mentioned that they could mitigate some of the abuse by looking at users with multiple accounts in a single app. The idea seems to be that if an abusive user creates multiple accounts and continues to have them suspended while using a single app, then Twitter should be able to spot these “problem” users.

https://twitter.com/mrdonut/status/826220441685463041

These changes will be rolling out as small product changes, and may not be immediately visible or even apparent to all users, but Twitter states it will “update you on progress every step of the way”.