Micro-blogging site Twitter will roll out new safety features which it hopes will stop the creation of abusive accounts on the platform, show fewer existing offensive tweets and hide irrelevant comments.
"Making Twitter a safer place is our primary focus," Ed Ho, Twitter VP of engineering, said in a blog post. "We stand for freedom of expression and people being able to see all sides of any topic. That's put in jeopardy when abuse and harassment stifle and silence those voices. We won't tolerate it and we're launching new efforts to stop it."
The changes include stopping the creation of new abusive accounts. The company says it is taking steps to identify people who have been permanently suspended and stop them from creating new accounts.
"This focuses more effectively on some of the most prevalent and damaging forms of behaviour, particularly accounts that are created only to abuse and harass others," says Ho.
Twitter will also start bringing forward safer search results for users. The 'safe search' will remove tweets that contain potentially sensitive content, and tweets from blocked and muted accounts, from users' search results. This existing content will still be discoverable if the user wants to find it, but Twitter says it will no longer clutter general search results.
The third change coming to Twitter is the collapsing of potentially abusive or low-quality tweets. This means tweets the Twitter team deems irrelevant will be hidden from conversations on the platform. These tweets can be viewed if actively sought out.
The new features will be rolled out globally over the next few weeks.
In November, Twitter said it was working on ways to address online bullying and expanded its mute feature. Last week, the company introduced an improvement to reporting abusive tweets that gives users experiencing targeted harassment more ways to report it.
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