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. Why can it quicky remove copyrighted Olympic content, but not stop rape threats?
The microblogging service is now trying to rectify that. Twitter on Thursday introduced two new features aimed at giving you "more control over what you see and who you interact with on Twitter," Product Manager Emil Leong wrote in a blog post.
For starters, the company is adding a new "quality filter" option to your notification settings that, when enabled, prevents you from seeing "lower-quality content, like duplicate Tweets or content that appears to be automated" in your notifications and other parts of Twitter.
Twitter began testing the feature last year, and it seems to work as intended. 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.'"
"Everyone should have this," Wu wrote.
Rest assured that enabling it shouldn't cause you to miss any messages you actually want to see. Twitter said it won't filter content from people you follow or accounts with which you've recently interacted.
Meanwhile, if you're sick of seeing notifications from random people, Twitter is rolling out another new option in notification settings that will limit alerts to only people you follow. Managing your notification settings should also soon be easier as you'll be able to access them from your notifications tab.
These new features will be rolling out to everyone over the coming days, Twitter said.
In other Twitter abuse news, the company on Thursday announced it has suspended another 235,000 accounts for violating its anti-terrorism polices. Add that to the suspensions announced in February, and Twitter has axed 360,000 accounts for terrorism policy violations since the middle of 2015, resulting in "a significant shift in this type of activity" off the platform.