Twitter Adds New Ways To Mute Trolls As It Beefs Up Anti-Harassment Tools
Trolls and cyber-bullying have been around since the very beginning of the internet. Twitter now has a way to sift through the potential hate, as the social media website is expanding the “mute” feature to encompass notifications.
Twitter noted that cyber-bullying inhibits “people from participating on Twitter, or anywhere. Abusive conduct removes the chance to see and share all perspectives around an issue, which we believe is critical to moving us all forward. In the worst cases, this type of conduct threatens human dignity, which we should all stand together to protect.”
Twitter first introduced its “mute” feature in 2014. Users have been able to go to accounts that they follow and “mute” them or avoid seeing all of their posts. This feature was useful if you did not want to hurt your Great Aunt Mabel’s feelings, but still did not want to see all of her cat pictures in your feed.
Now users cannot only mute specific accounts, but words, phrases, usernames, emojis, and hashtags up to 140 characters. Punctuation can be added, but is not necessary in order to mute a word. "Muting" a word will mute both the word itself and its hashtag, however, usernames must include the “@” symbol. Muting cannot be set for a particular time period, therefore, words and phrases will remain muted until manually deleted. You can mute conversations, however, you will still be able to see Tweets from the conversation in your timeline and when you click into the original Tweet.
Twitter’s “hateful conduct policy” forbids bullying on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease. Support teams have also been retrained and have received classes on the cultural and historical contextualization of certain hateful behavior.
Muting is available across Twitter-supported languages. It is also available on Android, iOS, and Twitter.com
Twitter noted that cyber-bullying inhibits “people from participating on Twitter, or anywhere. Abusive conduct removes the chance to see and share all perspectives around an issue, which we believe is critical to moving us all forward. In the worst cases, this type of conduct threatens human dignity, which we should all stand together to protect.”
Twitter first introduced its “mute” feature in 2014. Users have been able to go to accounts that they follow and “mute” them or avoid seeing all of their posts. This feature was useful if you did not want to hurt your Great Aunt Mabel’s feelings, but still did not want to see all of her cat pictures in your feed.
Now users cannot only mute specific accounts, but words, phrases, usernames, emojis, and hashtags up to 140 characters. Punctuation can be added, but is not necessary in order to mute a word. "Muting" a word will mute both the word itself and its hashtag, however, usernames must include the “@” symbol. Muting cannot be set for a particular time period, therefore, words and phrases will remain muted until manually deleted. You can mute conversations, however, you will still be able to see Tweets from the conversation in your timeline and when you click into the original Tweet.
Twitter’s “hateful conduct policy” forbids bullying on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease. Support teams have also been retrained and have received classes on the cultural and historical contextualization of certain hateful behavior.
Muting is available across Twitter-supported languages. It is also available on Android, iOS, and Twitter.com
