The platform is implementing new policies to clean up the service, and it no longer waits for users to report harassment before taking action against abusive tweets
Twitter is taking down abusive tweets without waiting for user complaints to first identify the bad actors, the company says in a new report about detoxifying the service.
On Tuesday, CEO Jack Dorsey, speaking at a TED Talk, disclosed his latest plans to purge harassers from the platform, or at least silence them. Dorsey said Twitter will test a mute button, which will allow people to hide replies to their tweets at their own discretion. This means a person who initiates a conversation, as the original tweet’s author, they can hide objectionable comments replying to the original tweet. Readers will have to tap on the hidden tweet to reveal it.
That’s just one of a number of tweaks already made on the media messaging service as it tries to clean up troll-like behavior that has haunted the product for years. In fact, Twitter says it only started proactively removing abusive tweets in the past year. Before that it relied on users to report harassment first.
Now, Twitter says it identifies 38 percent of the abusive tweets that get penalized on the platform—before the policy change last year Twitter uncovered zero percent of abusive tweets before first being tipped off.
Garrett Sloane – Ad Age – April 16, 2019.
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