Twitter Trials Abuse Blocking Filter

Internet trolls are everywhere and occasionally you may come across some, if you offend them with your opinion. Trolling is becoming more and more prevalent on social media sites such as  Facebook and Twitter. Thankfully the social networks that we all use and love are not blind to the problem. Twitter, for instance, is introducing a new filter to block the act of bullying and threatening messages from users’ timelines.  This new feature will only be available at first to users that are verified with a blue tick. Verified users will already have access to a feature that is called tailored filtering. This allows them see edited versions of their notifications that come from the users they chat to most.

The new security feature uses algorithms that can detect threatening words and their context. In turn the system decides whether to block that from a user’s feed. If you use the app, you are presented with a message that says: “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.”

Costolo said:

“We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years…It’s no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.”

Twitter users have also been given access to some improved security systems to report abuse on the network. This comes after chief executive Dick Costolo recently admitted last month the site had a problem. 

At that time, Costolo vowed to make a change to the Twitter service in order to combat the online harassment issues, which plague social media. Twitter has changed their harassment reporting tools to make it significantly easier to inform the authorities about threats to users or to the general public.

The filter is currently only available on Twitter’s app for Apple mobile devices.

[Image via abcnews]

SOURCE: Appy Geek