After months of mounting criticism, Twitter has announced expanded muting features to help curb abuse on their social network.
Abuse has run rampant on Twitter due to the nature of the social network — If your account is public, anyone can @ you and say whatever they want. What’s worse, those messages can’t leave your Mentions tab. You’re forced to look at them no matter how good or bad they are.
Now the bird has carried its mute feature over to notifications and mentions. The setting now hides users, hashtags, phrases, emojis, keywords, and conversations in these areas.
Twitter promises they’re “going to keep listening to make it better and more comprehensive over time.” Instructions on how to turn on advanced muting can be found in this support document.
What’s more, the social network has revealed that they’ve “retrained all of our support teams on our policies, including special sessions on cultural and historical contextualization of hateful conduct, and implemented an ongoing refresher program. We’ve also improved our internal tools and systems in order to deal more effectively with this conduct when it’s reported to us. Our goal is a faster and more transparent process.”
This, in theory, should help their team determine when to ban certain users faster than before. Slow abuse support has been one of the biggest criticisms against Twitter.
“We don’t expect these announcements to suddenly remove abusive conduct from Twitter,” they warn. “No single action by us would do that. Instead we commit to rapidly improving Twitter based on everything we observe and learn.”
Time will tell! Twitter says the new muting features are rolling out over the next few days.
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