The social network is now promising to curb the creation of new abusive
accounts, give preference to “safer” search results and crack down on “abusive” tweets.
“We’re taking steps to identify people who have been permanently
suspended and stop them from creating new accounts,” Ed Ho, VP of engineering at Twitter, notes in a new blog post.
“This focuses more effectively on some of the most prevalent and
damaging forms of behavior, particularly accounts that are created only to abuse and harass others,” Ho and his colleagues believe.
A new “safe search” initiative is designed
to remove Tweets that contain potentially sensitive content, as well as those that come from blocked and muted accounts. “While this type of content will be discoverable if you want to find it,
it won’t clutter search results any longer,” Ho explains.
Ho and his team have also been working on identifying and “collapsing” potentially abusive and low-quality
replies. Twitter’s various efforts to sanitize its network have presented their own problems.
For instance, after suspending the accounts of several prominent
members of the “alt-right,” the social giant mistakenly ran an ad sponsored by a white supremacist group this week.
Despite efforts to curb their activity, hatemongers have already
scared away some of Twitter’s most influential users.
Last summer, New York Times editor Jon Weisman gave up on the network, given its failure to stem the tide of anti-Semitism
being tweeted in his direction.
More recently, Twitter permanently suspended the account of conservative commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, but not before he directed a number of racist and
demeaning tweets in the direction of “Saturday Night Live” star Leslie Jones.
Internally, Twitter has long struggling to solve its troll problem.
Back in 2015 -- echoing
earlier comment s by then-CEO Dick Costolo -- Vijaya Gadde, general counsel for Twitter, wrote in The Washington Post: “Even when we
have recognized that harassment is taking place, our response times have been inexcusably slow and the substance of our responses too meager.”
Officially, Twitter says the rise of hate
speech goes beyond its platform. In a recent statement, the company asserted: “The amount of abuse, bullyin, and harassment we’ve seen across the Internet has risen sharply over the
past few years.”