Twitter has a big problem with online abuse. In response, Twitter appears to have acknowledged this and has made some improvements. It announced this in a blog post titled “Progress on addressing online abuse”.
Twitter has improved its mute feature. The mute feature allows a user to mute accounts that they don’t want to see tweets from. Twitter has now expanded mute so that it functions in notifications. The improved mute feature will enable you to mute keywords, phrases, and even entire conversations that you do not want to see notifications about. The expanded mute feature will be rolled out to all users in the coming days.
In the blog post, Twitter points out that their hateful conduct policy prohibits conduct that targets people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability or disease. Twitter has improved how to report that type of behavior.
Today we’re giving you a more direct way to report this type of conduct for yourself, or for others, whenever you see it happening. This will improve our ability to process these reports, which helps reduce the burden on the person experiencing the abuse, and helps strengthen a culture of collective support on Twitter.
In addition, Twitter has retrained all of their support teams on their policies, including special sessions on cultural and historical contextualization of hateful conduct, and implemented an ongoing refresher program. Twitter also improved its internal tools and systems in order to deal more effectively with this conduct when it is reported to them.