When former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo's memo stating, "We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've sucked at it for years," was made public, it was a clear indication that the company did take online harrassment seriously but at the same time they were powerless to control it. However, it seems that the company has devised a plan to control online harrassment and rolled out their new tools yesterday. Recently, there have been plenty of celebrities who have complained about relentless and targetted online harrassmen on Twitter; which has finally prompted the company to do something about it.
According to a report on USA Today, "Twitter took another swing at protecting its users from online harassment by rolling out a quality filter and making it easier to hide offensive notifications. The San Francisco, Calif.-based social media service will allow all users to block notifications for "low quality" tweets, or those that appear to be automated. The service determines low quality content using signals like account origin and behavior. Twitter will also let users choose to limit their notifications to only those from people they follow."
On the other hand, it will now allow users to filter out notifications and this is a huge step considering the fact that this was a feature that was only available to verified users, who usually have a following running into hundreds of thousands of followers. The reports stated, "Up until now, only verified accounts - those belonging to public figures denoted with a blue checkmark by their names - had the option of filtering out tweets. In another move to reduce harassment, Twitter last month said it was taking applications for verification to open up the feature to more users. But some users still reported trouble getting verified."
