In the past, Twitter has caught some flak over their policies regarding privacy and user protection, like preventing harassment and abuse. They have stepped their game up recently, but a few protections have remained locked away for only the elite. Specifically, there were a few account protection measures that were only available to users with verified accounts, denoted by a blue check mark. While Twitter has opened up applications for anybody that’s interested to get their account verified, even a genuine account run by a person with a decent number of followers will generally not pass muster, and the reasons for that are nebulous at best; when turned down, the letter from Twitter simply tells you to look back over the guidelines for a verified account.
While you don’t exactly have to be famous to get a verified account, it is still somewhat difficult and ambiguous. Thus, Twitter took to their blog on Thursday to announce that the protections afforded to verified users, such as filtering, are now available on all accounts. The new security and anti-abuse options can be found in your notifications settings. The first option, “Only people you follow”, is rather self-explanatory. The other new option for all accounts is a “quality filter”, which filters the Tweets that a user sees based on a number of algorithmic factors such as the origin of the account vying for the user’s attention, and recent activity on that account.
The quality filter is the more ambiguous of the two new settings, and according to Twitter’s blog post, does not filter out any activity from accounts that you either follow or have recently interacted with. Besides that, the way that Twitter determines what posts are worth your time is largely unknown. With these new filters in place, along with enhanced reporting and protections for users who are being harassed or seeing offensive content on the service, Twitter is slowly addressing the safety and security issues that have plagued it since its inception, and the newest changes are sure to delight a large number of users who have been looking for a more focused and refined experience.