Ah, trolls. They are the scourge of everyone’s social media experience, to be sure. Twitter knows just how irritating these anonymous people are, who have nothing better to do than provoke online fights. That’s why the network has developed so-called “block lists,” which are being described as a more sophisticated tool in the online fight against trolls.
Now, Twitter has a new feature update that’ll make it even easier for users to block more people, more efficiently than ever before. Whereas users only had the option of blocking trolls individually – which could have been quite time-consuming, considering how many trolls were coming after you – they can now block multiple trolls at the same time.
Making the online world safer from trolls involves true community cooperation. Users can take these block lists and then export and share them with their Twitter buddies who’ve been besieged by the same trolls. Vice versa, they’re also able to import other users’ block lists.
Exporting and importing a block list is easy. Users simply have to navigate to their “blocked accounts” settings. Once there, they have to hit the advanced options menu to select the specific action they want to take. If users want to download a list of their blocked accounts for future reference, they can do this, too. All it takes is choosing the export option and picking the accounts that should be exported.
Twitter has recently stepped up its efforts to make inroads against trolling. Late last year, the company unveiled the blocked accounts settings page and made it impossible for blocked profiles to still view the users who blocked them. Then, this past April, Twitter announced more enforcement updates. This is all part of the company’s initiative to build a “safer” Twitter.
While the company’s efforts are commendable, trolls have a way of relentlessly popping up again, so it will be interesting to see how successful Twitter’s efforts at combating trolling will be in the future.
