Twitter has been under fire a lot lately due to some pretty well known users getting harassed via the social media site. These harassed users who’s lives and families were threatened were essentially left to fend for themselves as Twitter’s anti-harassment tools made for dealing with said issues were so bad and outdated that were useless. Now, it looks like the media and public have both put enough pressure on Twitter to reform their blocking and reporting systems because today it looks like they have done just that.
Earlier today, Twitter announced some pretty substantial changes to their blocking and reporting systems that will supposedly make it easier for harassed users to stop being harassed. Twitter has said the following, “In our continuing effort to make your Twitter experience safer, we’re enhancing our in-product harassment reporting and making improvements to “block”.” The reporting process will be more mobile-friendly, require less information about the user, and make it easier to flag Tweets and accounts for Twitter to review and look into. But perhaps the biggest change to Twitter’s reporting system is that they have promised faster response times. Twitter says that they have made the first of several “behind-the scenes” improvements that will ultimately help them review reporting tweets and accounts quicker than before.
Moving on to the improvements to Twitters blocking system, they have added a new blocked accounts page as well as made it so that accounts that you have blocked will no longer be able to view your account. As for the new blocked accounts page, this is a page that will show users all of the accounts that they have blocked. This page will also offer users a few options such as the ability yo mute blocked accounts. Twitter has said that more options will be added to this page in the future. As of now, the update that adds these improvements to Twitters anti-harassment tools is limited to a small group of testers but will roll out to all users “in the coming weeks.” What do you guys think of these updates? Have you been waiting for an update like this or does this type of thing not concern you? Let us know in the comments section below.