Twitter stands up for its users and wants to make the experience a much more pleasant one for those with the misfortune of encountering internet trolls.
It is because of this that the social media platform announced the launch of a feature that will allow its users to document and share abusive users with the rest of the community.
Hateful trolls are a real problem as they not only spam “good” users with poorly constructed messages that they’re not interested in, but they can also hack their accounts and share their personal information or modify their page preferences.
What’s worse, they can attack them with written harassments that affect their mental state if they last for long enough periods of time, and such encounters have already driven some of the more sensitive and impulsive internet users to attempt suicide in the past.
Not that such behavior is positive anywhere on the internet, but Twitter is a particular unsuited place for it as many writers, actors, directors, musicians, politicians and other public figures made social media platform their default tool for interacting with fans and supporters.
And they’re not just keeping people updated on what projects they’re currently working on, many of them use Twitter to raise money and awareness for various charitable causes.
So, in response to abusive internet users everywhere, earlier this week, on Wednesday (June 10, 2015), Twitter launched a feature that allows users to export their list of blocked users as a .CVS file and share it with the rest of the community so that others can “slay” the trolls as well, with a little crowd sourcing help.
One of the great things is that users can block an entire list of trolls at the time, rather having to block each one individually.
Xiaoyun Zhang, Twitter engineer, wrote a blog post saying that “While many users find them useful, we also recognize that some users – those who experience high volumes of unwanted interactions on Twitter – need more sophisticated tools. We also hope these advanced blocking tools will prove useful to the developer community to further improve users’ experience”.
Currently the feature is only available to a select, restricted number of users in order to test it, but if it all goes as expected, you should be able to start using it sometime in the next few weeks.
The new feature is not Twitter’s first attempt at creating a better “home” for its users, but it looks like it’s going to be their most promising one.
The social media platform took steps this past December to improve its blocking feature, allowing users to prevent trolls from even seeing the profile page of those who have blocked them. And earlier this year, in March, it started banning users who posted threats of violence against others.
In April, Dick Costolo, Twitter’s CEO, gave a statement admitting that he is ashamed of how poorly the company has been dealing with the issue during his tenure as CEO.
Image Source: theinquirer.net cialis levitra viagra
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.