TWITTER WILL LOCK OUT abusive users from their accounts in the latest measures to ensure safety on the social network.
The move sees two policy changes. The company is introducing an enforcement option that will allow its support team to lock abusive Twitter accounts for specific periods of time, and ask users to confirm their phone number and delete certain tweets.
Shreyas Doshi, director of product management at Twitter, cited the example of multiple users harassing a particular person or group of people as an occasion when account lockdown would be used.
The violent threats policy has also been updated as it was too “narrow” in its previous guise, according to Twitter.
‘Direct, specific threats of violence against others’ has now been extended to ‘threats of violence against others or promot[ing] violence against others’.
“The updated language better describes the range of prohibited content and our intention to act when users step over the line into abuse,” Doshi noted.
Twitter is also testing technology to help the firm identify suspected abusive tweets to limit their reach.
“This feature takes into account a wide range of signals and context that frequently correlates with abuse, including the age of the account itself, and the similarity of a tweet to other content that our safety team has in the past independently determined to be abusive,” Doshi explained.
“It will not affect your ability to see content that you’ve explicitly sought out, such as tweets from accounts you follow, but instead is designed to help us limit the potential harm of abusive content.”
The latest announcement is one in a series of steps the social network has taken to make it a safer place for all users. Late last year, Twitter received praise from Get Safe Online for its updated anti-harassment tools, which made it easier for users to report offensive tweets.
The authorities are also making efforts to clamp down on Twitter abuse. Caroline Criado-Perez was targeted on the site after campaigning to have Jane Austen immortalised on the UK’s £10 note.
This led to the Crown Prosecution Service charging a man and a woman with “improper use of a communications network”, which led to prison sentences for the accused.