Twitter claims to tackle online abuse with beefed up technical measures to stop repeat offenders

February 8, 2017 12:59

Twitter has reacted to growing community and advertiser concerns about the use of the social media network as a platform for harassment and abuse, introducing a series of new safety measures which it claims will stop abusers who have been permanently suspended from creating new accounts.

Twitter says it is treating the issue of abuse as a matter of urgency

In a series of changes to be introduced in coming weeks, Twitter has vowed to stop the creation of new abusive accounts, will introduce safer search that will hide tweets with “potentially sensitive content” from immediate view, and will collapse abusive and “low quality” replies to keep more relevant replies at the top of a conversation.

However, Twitter would not specify how it would block repeat offenders. Replying to a question from Mumbrella, a spokesperson said: “We’ll use a variety of signals from all of our accounts to identify repeat offenders. Once we have high confidence, we act.”

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Simon Canning

Simon Canning was Mumbrella's marketing and advertising editor from 2015-2017. In a career spanning journalism and communications over more than 30 years Simon has become one of Australia’s most respected analysts and commentators on the advertising, marketing and media industries. A regular commentator on radio and TV, Simon has also worked in media in the US and UK .

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