Twitter has announced several measures to regulate offensive tweets on its micro-blogging platform. In a statement on Tuesday, the firm’s engineering vice-president, Ed Ho, said it would suspend any creation of new abusive accounts and “collapse any potentially abusive or low-quality replies to tweets”.
While stating that Twitter was committed to making the platform a safer space, Ho said the company would continue to introduce these filters. He also said a “safe search” project, which filters sensitive content and tweets from blocked and muted accounts in user search results, was in the pipeline. “While this type of content will be discoverable if you want to find it, it won’t clutter search results any longer,” the statement said.
Ho said the restriction on new abusive accounts would be done by identifying people who have been permanently suspended and preventing them from starting new accounts. Twitter will not tolerate abuse and harassment, he said.
Online harassment and hate speech are common on social media platforms. However, according to company officials, there has been a remarkable rise of such incidents around the time of the United States presidential elections.
In November 2016, the social media site had introduced a mute button that allows users to block abusive words and phrases from their notifications. In 2015, the company had banned hate speech, the promotion of violence and attacks or threat to others on the basis of race, ethnicity, colour and others. The firm had also said it was training its staff on how to recognise abusive behaviour.
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