Twitter Provides Three More Enhancements to Dealing with Abuse and Harassment (Mar 1, 2017)

I’ve been very critical of Twitter over its poor response to abuse and harassment on the platform, so I don’t think they should get a free pass now just because they’ve finally decided to do something about it. However, kudos to them for finally acting on these issues after the years of bizarre prevarication on this point – they’ve now moving quickly, as promised (here are two other steps taken in the last few weeks). These latest changes are actually some of the best they’ve announced during this period, because they actually remove content proactively from your feed based on algorithms. This has always seemed like it would have to be a big part of the answer – human curation was never going to be able to deal with the volumes involved here. But another positive change is more feedback on abuse reports users submit, which has been largely missing from the app itself so far. There’s still a risk of false positives and Twitter definitely needs mechanisms for appeal and reinstatement where those occur, but it does finally feel like Twitter is making meaningful progress here.

via Twitter


The company, topic, and narrative tags below will take you to other posts with the same tags. The narrative link(s) will also take you to the narrative essay which provides additional context behind the post.

Vote for or share this post

Use the Like button below to vote for this post as one of the most important of the week. The posts voted most important are more likely to be included in the News Roundup podcast episode I do each week. Or use the sharing buttons to share a link to this post to social networks or other services.