Twitter now lets you mute 'eggs' and will tell you when action is taken against trolls

In 2017, Twitter has introduced a number of safety features intended to improve the experience of its users
Twitter CEO Jack DorseyGetty Images / Larry French

Twitter is finally taking abuse on its site seriously and has introduced more features to stop trolls from abusing legitimate users.

As part of a wave of changes, the social network has made it possible to mute anonymous users – known as eggs – who haven't changed their default profile picture. A button added in the settings of Twitter's app allows for accounts without pictures, unconfirmed email addresses or phone numbers to be muted.

Messages and mentions from the unconfirmed accounts will not be visible when the setting is turned on. The mute feature has also been expanded beyond this.

"Now, you’ll be able to mute from your home timeline and you can decide how long this content is muted – one day, one week, one month, or indefinitely," Twitter wrote in a blog post.

Twitter adds that it is trying to improve the transparency of its abuse reporting process and anyone who has reported Tweets or accounts will be notified when their report has been looked at. There will be a further notification if action is taken.

The updates are some of a number of additions Twitter has recently made to its safety features. They follow years of heavy criticism for failing to tackle abusive accounts and trolls.

But not everything has gone smoothly. Twitter recently reversed one of the safety features it introduced two hours after rolling it out in February. It had planned to stop sending notifications to people when they were added to a list but shortly after the announcement, the company backtracked.

Anyone on Twitter is able to create lists and add users to them. Lists can act as separate feeds of tweets that are curated by an account holder and they often focus on a particular topic or event.

"We want you to get notifications that matter," Twitter said at the time. However, users complained that being notified about being added to a list makes it possible to tell who is looking at profiles.

Read more: Twitter's latest earnings call confirm it isn't failing, it's resetting

"Critical for people to know if they've been added to a list intended for targets," tweeted @SwiftOnSecurity. "This is blinding the vulnerable."

In response, Ed Ho, Twitter's vice president of engineering, said the company was disabling the new feature. "This was a misstep," he replied to those questioning the move, continuing: "we are reversing the change".

Twitter has long been criticised for not doing enough to tackle harassment on the social network and, last week, introduced three new tools to stop users being bullied while online. These included stopping the creation of new abusive accounts, adding safer searches and collapsing abusive tweets.

In a February blog post, Twitter said making the website a "safer place is our primary focus" and it "won't tolerate" harassment.

To stop accounts being created to specifically attack users, Twitter added it is "taking steps" to identify who has been suspended and not allow them to make a new account. It did not go into more detail on how it intends to do this.

"We’re also working on ‘safe search’ which removes Tweets that contain potentially sensitive content and Tweets from blocked and muted accounts from search results," Twitter said.

The third update involves stopping all parts of conversations between users and @ replies from being seen. Jack Dorsey's firm said it will collapse "potentially abusive and low-quality replies" to tweets.

Before the announcements, Ed Ho, Twitter's vice president of engineering, said there will be a number of "long overdue fixes" to the website. "Making Twitter a safer place is our primary focus and we are now moving with more urgency than ever," Ho said in a post. "We heard you, we didn't move fast enough last year; now we're thinking about progress in days and hours not weeks and months."

Some of the changes will not be explicitly noticeable among those using Twitter, Ho says, but others will be fairly obvious. Initially, the changes will focus on the mute and block features. Repeat offenders will also be prevented from creating new accounts after being suspended.

When Dorsey asked users what Twitter should change in 2017, many requested better anti-harassment tools. One user, @amberdiscko, asked for "more visibility into how harassment reports are handled", as well as preventative measures for repeat offenders.

Twitter has had a problem with harassment for years. High-profile celebrities and activists have been forced to leave the social network after suffering abuse.

In July 2016, Dorsey said abuse "doesn't have a place on Twitter". This followed former CEO Dick Costolo telling staff in an email in 2015 that there was a serious issue with abuse. One study, published in May 2016, revealed more than 200,000 aggressive tweets were posted by 86,500 users over a three-week period.

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"I’m frankly ashamed of how poorly we’ve dealt with this issue during my tenure as CEO," Costolo wrote. "It’s absurd. There’s no excuse for it." Costolo continued: “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.”

Since the public admission of failure, Twitter has been trying to improve what it does to protect its users - although it has still come under intense criticism for not doing enough. For the first time, in 2015, the company changed its rules to explicitly ban "hateful conduct". In April 2016, Dorsey's firm expanded the possibility to report more than one tweet at a time.

August 2016 saw a quality filter being introduced to remove "lower-quality content". The filter removes tweets from a person's @-mentions, when they are not being followed.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK