Twitter Adds New Features Aimed at Reducing Harassment

Twitter on Tuesday announced new features designed to curb harassment, hate speech and bullying from its social media platform.

Users will be able to mute certain people, keywords and phrases — along with conversations they are tagged in — from showing up in their notifications tab. Twitter also made it easier to report abuse and said it has "retrained" its support team to better recognize hate speech.

The company has been criticized for failing to respond adequately to reports of harassment, especially during a highly charged presidential campaign where issues of race and religion were at the forefront.

"Because Twitter happens in public and in real-time, we’ve had some challenges keeping up with and curbing abusive conduct," Twitter said in a blog post on its website Tuesday morning. "We took a step back to reset and take a new approach, find and focus on the most critical needs, and rapidly improve."

A report last month from the Anti-Defamation League found that more than 800 campaign reporters have been the target of anti-Semitic tweets from more than 1,600 accounts, most of them supporting Donald Trump.

Twitter, though, suspended only 21 percent of those accounts, the report found.

Similarly, Buzzfeed News surveyed its readers who had reported hateful tweets to Twitter. Of those more than 2,000 people it received responses from, less than 3 percent found Twitter deleted the offending account.

The company hopes its new initiatives will cut down on harassment on its platform.

"The amount of abuse, bullying, and harassment we’ve seen across the Internet has risen sharply over the past few years," Twitter's blog post said. "These behaviors inhibit people from participating on Twitter, or anywhere.

"Abusive conduct removes the chance to see and share all perspectives around an issue, which we believe is critical to moving us all forward. In the worst cases, this type of conduct threatens human dignity, which we should all stand together to protect."

Read more about how the new features work here.

Image via Matthew Keys, used under Creative Commons