Twitter to battle online abuse, thanks to its latest update

Social media giant Twitter has been struggling with tackling online abuse since some time now. The company has been working on making the platform a safer place since November last year.

They introduced an improvement on reporting abusive Tweets last week which essentially gave users additional ways to report what they describe as targeted harassment. Now, the company has made a new announcement stating three primary changes including, stopping the creation of new abusive accounts, bringing forward safer search results and collapsing potentially abusive or low-quality Tweets.

Twitter will now be 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.

The company is also working on ‘safe search’ which removes Tweets that contain potentially sensitive content and Tweets from blocked and muted accounts from search results. This type of content is discoverable only if the user wants to find it.

The Twitter team has also been working on identifying and collapsing potentially abusive and low-quality replies so that most relevant conversations are brought forward. These Tweet replies will still be accessible to those who seek them out.

The new update will be rolled out gradually in the coming days.