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Twitter is now trialling a trolling filter feature under mounting pressure for the social network to tackle online harassment.
Dubbed a ‘quality filter’, the optional feature will give users the chance to clean up their feeds with minimal effort (via Anil Dash).
Twitter describes the feature as aiming to ‘remove all Tweets from your notifications timeline that contain threats, offensive or abusive language, duplicate content, or are sent from suspicious accounts.’
According to a Twitter spokesperson (via The Verge), the quality filter is only currently available to verified users.
The optional quality filter setting, via Anil Dash
Verified users are typically high profiles individuals in the public eye, and are generally more prone to abuse than casual users.
This move comes as no surprise; Twitter has been very public about its failure to keep the trolling epidemic under wraps.
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Just last month, the company’s CEO Dick Costolo said the following: “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years.”
“It’s no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.”
At the time, Costolo vowed to make a change to the Twitter service to combat online harassment.
Since then, Twitter changed its harassment reporting tools to make it significantly easier to inform authorities about threats to users or to the public.
