Twitter has been doing its best to fight abuse on its social network, including apologizing for its past neglect and promising to work harder to stop such abuses. Now, the company plans to deal with the issue with some changes in its policy.
Shreyas Doshi, director of product management at Twitter, released a statement on Tuesday about two major policy changes that would impact all of the service's users. The announcement comes after Twitter General Counsel Vijaya Gadde wrote an op-ed apologizing for Twitter's inappropriate behavior in the past.
As part of this policy change, Twitter will be "updating [it's] violent threats policy so that the prohibition is not limited to 'direct, specific threats of violence against others' but now extends to 'threats of violence against others or promot[ing] violence against others.'"
Doshi apologized for Twitter's previous policy, stating that it as "unduly narrow and limited our ability to act on certain kinds of threatening behavior." Twitter is also adding an enforcement feature that "gives [Twitter's] support team the ability to lock abusive accounts for specific periods of time. This option gives us leverage in a variety of contexts, particularly where multiple users begin harassing a particular person or group of people."
The second big change in Twitter's policy is the addition of a product feature that would allow the company to do a better job at predicting who was acting as an abuser and respond accordingly. Doshi said this feature "takes into account a wide range of signals and context that frequently correlates with abuse including the age of the account itself, and the similarity of a Tweet to other content that our safety team has in the past independently determined to be abusive." However, the feature will not affect your ability to see content you're explicitly seeking out, nor does it "take into account whether the content posted or followed by a user is controversial or unpopular." Twitter will instead use this new tool to limit the potential damage that abusive content could cause.
