Twitter is almost 11 years old, and for the first decade of its existence, it struggled to find substantive ways to stop growing harassment and abuse on the platform. But Twitter has used the past several months to try to change that perception by rolling out a series of not-insubstantial anti-abuse changes to how Twitter works.
The latest of those changes will make it harder for permanently banned users to return to the site under new accounts, filter already marked “potentially sensitive” content from the default search results, and add a filter to conversations that hides “potentially abusive” or “low-quality” replies unless you opt in to see them.
Like many of Twitter’s latest anti-harassment initiatives, the search and conversation tweaks rely on filtering — rather than eliminating — abusive behavior from the platform. The announcement doesn’t give a ton of specifics about how these new measures will actually work once they roll out in the coming weeks, or how exactly it’s determined what sort of content should be filtered out. So, like many of Twitter’s anti-harassment tweaks, we will have to wait and see how they actually work in practice.
In the meantime, however, Twitter also has a handful of tools to help those experiencing abuse on the platform to some degree. Some have been improved over the past few months, as Twitter appears to make a more serious commitment to fighting abuse. Below is a refresher on each.
• Quality filter: Twitter introduced a “quality filter” to verified users on the platform’s iOS app in early 2015. The idea was, essentially, that users could opt in to allowing Twitter to automatically hide potentially abusive tweets from their notifications. As of August, that filter is now available to all users. Its universal roll-out followed a particularly high-profile instance of abuse on the platform, when a mob of racist trolls harassed actress Leslie Jones.
Twitter constantly tests and tweaks things like this, but when The Washington Post tested one of its earliest iterations, we found that the quality filter worked pretty well, should you essentially want a spam and abuse filter for the platform. In that test, the filter hid tweets with unambiguously threatening language from obvious troll accounts. It didn’t hide normal, everyday criticism or tweets about news stories that contained words such as “rape” or “kill.”
To turn on the quality filter, go to the “notifications” tab under your Twitter settings and check the box. It is also worth noting that, in the same section, you can go even further and only allow notifications from people you follow.
• Mute: Twitter has allowed users to “mute” specific accounts for a long time, essentially making them invisible without actually blocking them. But for some reason, it took until last November for the platform to introduce the ability to also mute by keyword, hashtag or conversation.
Here’s how to mute keywords: Go to your Twitter settings, and look for the “muted words” tab. Twitter will pop up a little message telling you that muting words will, as implied, hide any tweets containing those words from your notifications and replies. You can always delete keywords from the mute list.
To mute a conversation, click the little arrow on the side of any tweet or reply in a conversation, and it’ll bring up a drop-down menu. One of the options: “Mute this conversation.” Basically, this will stop you from seeing updates in your notifications for any future replies to that tweet. This is useful for, say, if you end up tagged in an argument between other Twitter users, or when someone tweets something objectionable to you and you’d prefer not to see anything else that follows in that thread.
You can also see a third “mute” option: muting a user. This has been around longer, and it’s a way to make sure you don’t see content from someone, without actually blocking them. You can mute Twitter accounts you follow, along with those you don’t, but as Twitter explains, the “mute” feature behaves slightly differently in each case.
• Block: Blocking someone does a couple of things right away: Neither account can follow the other, the blocked account can’t see your tweets if you’re logged in, and they can’t send you direct messages. If you block someone, Twitter doesn’t notify that person. But they will know right away if they try to visit your Twitter page.
Block is one of the oldest tools available to combat harassment and trolling on Twitter, first introduced in 2007. Twitter tried to get rid of it a couple of years ago (the idea was to replace it with “mute”), but the announcement was extremely unpopular and the company reversed course.
While effective, blocking isn’t perfect. If your account is public, the person you’ve blocked simply has to log out to see your tweets, for instance. That’s certainly a pain, but not enough of a pain to deter a motivated troll.
