Today, Twitter announced a new set of features to
combat hateful and abusive content. 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, in a new blog post
said,
'Twitter is working on identifying users that have been
permanently suspended and prevent them from creating
new accounts. This new measure specifically targets
"accounts that are created only to abuse and harass
others," 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,".
Twitter's decision to hide or collapse abusive content,
rather than delete or ban it, is in keeping with its long
standing position as a defender of free speech and
"people being able to see all sides of any topic," as Ho
said at the very top of his post.
