Twitter announces new features to deal with hateful and abusive content

Today, Twitter announced a new set of features to combat hateful and abusive content. The changes include preventing serial abusers from creating new accounts, a new "safe search" function and blocking potentially abusive and "low-quality" tweets from appearing in conversations.


Twitter's engineering chief Ed Ho,  in a new blog post said,

'Twitter is working on identifying users that have been permanently suspended and prevent them from creating new accounts. This new measure specifically targets "accounts that are created only to abuse and harass others,"  a problem that has long plagued the platform.  

The new safe search function prevents tweets that are abusive or from blocked and muted accounts from appearing in users' search results. Those tweets can still be found if people want to see them, but they "won't clutter search results any longer,". 

Twitter's decision to hide or collapse abusive content, rather than delete or ban it, is in keeping with its long standing position as a defender of free speech and "people being able to see all sides of any topic," as Ho said at the very top of his post.