2016 saw twitter battling online abuse this is something that will continue with renewed effort in 2017. After the US election, a series of harassing tweets on Twitter saw the company innovate new ways of combating online abuse. Online abuse is a common problem with any social network, and Twitter suffered a backlash last year due to numerous cases of hate speech and harassment.
On November 2016, Twitter introduced user protection tools to help deal with the abuse problem. The company broadened the use of the “mute button,” allowing users to easily spot specific keywords and mute tweets and conversations that they deemed abusive or unethical, such as racial slurs, religious views or profanity.
The company also introduced a new reporting system in which users would easily and quickly report hateful tweets targeted at race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, disease, age, disability or ethnicity.
Twitter also said that it had re-trained all its employees on company policies, which do not allow any hate towards a person. The training involved various sessions on the context of harassment and abuse both culturally and historically. Jack Dorsey, the company CEO, said that the changes displayed progress in stopping the menace.
On the 2016 Twitter post, Twitter noted that many people had previously taken advantage of loopholes like microblogging sites to bully and harass their victims. The main reason why the social media company had been unable to keep up with the abusers is that tweets real-time and open to the public.
Since the launching of ways to curb the menace, the most prolific case was that of Leslie Jones vs. Milo Yiannopoulos. The company took drastic steps and banned Milo Yiannopoulos, a Breitbart Editor for mercilessly bullying Leslie Jones, the Ghostbusters star.
Twitter acknowledged freedom of speech and was cautious not to limit people from freely expressing themselves. Twitter insists a problem, however, only arises when conversations turn sour and target specific individuals and groups people and that’s when Twitter starts to lay down the rule.
As much as Twitter has made efforts to make the online platform a better place for its users, the company knows that it can’t work on its own and needs a collective effort from its users. Once a user reports harassment, the company plans to sort it out swiftly without any delays.
Twitter was quick to point out that it still supports free speech, but insists hate speech takes everyone backward takes people away from meaningful conversations. The good work continues on twitter battling online abuse ( or so they say)
What do you think, will this impact in any way the people doing twitter marketing? How about the twitter spammers?