• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, July 10, 2017

Despite recent cleanup efforts, Twitter remains synonymous with bullying, personal attacks and other questionable behavior.  

To combat the problem, the social giant continues to give users more tools to police their own feeds.

In addition to enabling Twitter’s existing “quality filter,” users can now choose to disable notifications from new accounts they don’t follow and accounts that don’t follow them.

“Now, you have even more control over your notifications,” Twitter tweeted on Monday.

Plus, users can block notifications from accounts with a default profile photo, without a confirmed email address, and without a confirmed phone number.

Of course, these are all common traits of accounts with no intention of contributing anything positive to the broader discussion on Twitter, i.e., trolls.

Showing new signs of life, Twitter recently reported strong user growth during the first quarter of 2017. The social giant said it added about 9 million new users -- making it the biggest quarterly bump in years. Analysts were pleasantly surprised by Twitter’s user growth.

Y-O-Y, average monthly active users jumped 6% from 319 million to 328 million, during the first quarter. Among other factors, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey attributed the rebound to better policing of trolls, bullies and other bad actors.

“We are seeing a significant decrease in the number of people experiencing abuse on Twitter,” Dorsey told investors on an earnings call, in April. Twitter is also doing a better job of rolling out new products and meeting the needs of average users, he added.

After leaving Twitter in 2011, cofounder Biz Stone also recently returned to the company on a full-time basis.