Twitter Tries To Stamp Out Trolls

Twitter has rolled out policy changes and technology to detect trolls.

15:39 23 April 2015

Twitter has rolled out a major update to fix the growing problem with trolling. It introduced policy updates as well as a new technology to detect trolls and protect users from abuse. The site’s policy has also been revised; where it once only prohibited “direct, specific threats of violence against others”, it now bans “threats of violence against others or promot[ing] violence against others.” 

 

The director of product management Shreyas Doshi announced the changes in a blog post. He wrote: “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.”

 

“It will not affect your ability to see content that you’ve explicitly sought out, such as Tweets from accounts you follow, but instead is designed to help us limit the potential harm of abusive content.”

 

The changes were introduced the same way that Twitter turned on the ability to receive direct messages from any user. 

 

Twitter also introduced new features allowing users to easily block and report abuse. 

 

“While dedicating more resources toward better responding to abuse reports is necessary and even critical, an equally important priority for us is identifying and limiting the incentives that enable and even encourage some users to engage in abuse,” Doshi wrote.

 

“We'll be monitoring how these changes discourage abuse and how they help ensure the overall health of a platform that encourages everyone’s participation. And as the ultimate goal is to ensure that Twitter is a safe place for the widest possible range of perspectives, we will continue to evaluate and update our approach in this critical arena.”