Ever since last month when the world learned that Twitter CEO Dick Costolo really didn’t have a high opinion of the way the company dealt with abuse on the platform, his team has been rolling out update after update in a bid to improve the situation.
The latest change arrives as part of an iOS app update rolled out Monday. Spotted by tech entrepreneur Anil Dash, ‘quality filtering’ aims to “remove all tweets from your notifications timeline that contain threats, offensive or abusive language, duplicate content, or are sent from suspicious accounts.”
Well, that’s an interesting & welcome addition, Twitter! (Was prompted about this on opening the app.) pic.twitter.com/Ka2VDvqwNf
— Anil Dash (@anildash) March 23, 2015
It seems that the new feature is for now being offered to verified users, or some verified users. Once the update has been downloaded, a message gives them the opportunity to enable the filter or leave it off.
There’s been no official word from Twitter on the new feature – the update notes speak only of “minor improvements – so it seems the company is currently testing the effectiveness of the tool with a limited number of users before deciding whether to roll it out to the rest of the community across all platforms.
Last week Twitter made it easier for users suffering abuse on the service to report incidents to the police, while last month it announced it was expanding the team that deals with reports of abuse. While these moves aim to improve the way harassment is dealt with by Twitter, the ‘quality filter’ is the first effort aimed at actually reducing the amount of abuse seen by a user.
Twitter’s recent efforts to deal more robustly with users who violate the service’s rules come after CEO Dick Costolo’s frank admission in internal emails sent in February in which he admitted the company “sucks at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years.”
With some harassed users choosing to quit Twitter, the team is making efforts to root out trolls so that, in the words of Costolo, “when they issue their ridiculous attacks, nobody hears them.”
