Twitter has been accused of focusing its development efforts on the wrong things: giving us stickers, for instance, when some users are still being inundated with harassing messages.
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Almost every person who yells “harassment” on Twitter is a case of someone literally wanting to play the victim in the public sphere because sensible, sane people (that is 99 percent of Twitter users) know that the easiest way to deal with someone you disagree with or who may be “harassing” you is to block them, end of story.
Women, men, old and young of color have always held the view that the platform is filled with racists and other abusive remarks.
Twitter says that these features are purely opt-in, so if you don’t want your account messed with at all, you can keep everything the same. But for people such as celebrities, politicians, or outspoken feminists, Twitter notifications can be a very dark place.
As The Verge points out, this quality filter has been available to verified accounts for quite some time, and now it will be available to the checkmark-less plebes as well.
You’ll also find a new quality filter in the notification settings.
The second change would be what Twitter is calling a “quality filter”.
“Twitter continues to struggle with growing its user base because new users often find the product unwieldy and hard to navigate, which makes it challenging to find long-term value in being an active user”, Oscar Orozco, an analyst at eMarketer, notes in a new report.
As of Thursday (Aug. 18), all Twitter users can use the filter to weed out “lower-quality content, like duplicate tweets or content that appears to be automated, “the company announced in a blog post”. To use this feature, all you have to do is turn it on.
Turning the quality filter on will reduce the amount of interactions you see in your notifications tab, but it won’t filter people you follow and accounts you’ve tweeted with before. The company notes, however, that it will not filter out any content from accounts you follow back or with which you have recently interacted.
Twitter also revealed yesterday that in the last six months it had closed more than 235,000 accounts which promoted terrorism.
“People should be able to express diverse opinions and beliefs on Twitter”.
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Leslie Jones brought up the subject of Twitter’s abuse patterns as she departed from the platform “in tears”, in the wake of a barrage of racially targeted tweets and death threats. Perhaps it will deter users from spewing hateful tweets knowing that it won’t even be seen by the recipient. Verified users first received the quality filter in 2015.
