The microblogging platform announced the features on its blog. Users open to a hybrid solution can try the company’s “quality filter”, which was built to distinguish between good and abusive mentions using software algorithms. “Turning it on filters lower-quality content, like duplicate Tweets or content that appears to be automated, from your notifications and other parts of your Twitter experience”.
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Twitter is finally letting all its users filter notifications in order to avoid abuse and harassment.
Twitter began “testing” the quality filter previous year with a smaller number of users, primarily those with verified accounts. Now, after nearly a year and a half of testing, non-verified users also have access.
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The downside is that blocking notifications from those you don’t follow means you may also miss out on mentions you want to see. In a Sunday tweet, developer Brianna Wu, who was caught up in GamerGate harassment, said she has “not seen a single death threat or rape threat since being verified and getting the ‘quality filter'”. In other words, humans suck sometimes, and there are too many bots on Twitter. There have already been several high-profile controversies this year involving tweets that seemed to “disappear” from the site. But the product has changed little, and anti-abuse advocates argue that the company has to do much more to adequately tackle the issue. Twitter later called the piece “unfair” but acknowledged that the site still had “a lot of work to do”.
