Twitter has been criticized in the past for focusing more on freedom of speech and anonymity than on curbing those who use the service to abuse and harass. Recently, however, the company has been trying to show that it is listening to such complaints, and on Wednesday it rolled out a new suite of features designed to help do that. The most far-reaching — and probably also the most difficult — of these efforts involves trying to identify abusive behavior before it has been reported by a user.
Over time, Twitter has improved the way that it handles abuse and harassment reports, by removing hurdles and speeding up its response time (although some users argue it is still too difficult). But now, the company says it is focusing on identifying abuse while it is actually occurring, instead of waiting until a user flags it.
According to a blog post by Ed Ho, Twitter’s VP of Engineering, if the service’s algorithm detects that abuse is happening, it will take one of a number of potential steps to reduce the potential harm, including “limiting certain account functionality for a set amount of time.”
Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017
These limits include making it impossible for anyone but a user’s followers to see their tweets. This appears to be the “time out” feature that a number of users reported seeing recently after they posted tweets that were seen as abusive. They got a message saying their account would be restricted for up to 12 hours, and would then return to normal.
The Twitter blog post notes that the service “supports the freedom to share any viewpoint,” but if an account violates the rules then action will be taken. The difficult part for Twitter will be determining what is a joke, or a sarcastic remark between friends, or some other innocuous statement, and what is actual harassment or abuse.
“We aim to only act on accounts when we’re confident, based on our algorithms, that their behavior is abusive,” says Ho. “Since these tools are new we will sometimes make mistakes, but know that we are actively working to improve and iterate on them everyday.”
A number of the users whose accounts were limited after this feature was being tested complained that their free-speech rights were being restricted for no reason, just because they used a specific word. One tweet said a user had been “put on the naughty step” by a “digital daddy.”
In the past, Twitter has trumpeted its status as the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party,” the service responsible for helping topple dictators in Egypt and Libya. Cracking down on abuse inevitably means deciding what kind of speech is tolerated and what isn’t, something Facebook has also run into difficulty with.
In addition to the algorithmic, real-time curbs, Twitter said that it is adding more fine-grained filtering options for notifications, so that users can control what they see and from whom. For example, users will be able to filter out tweets from accounts that have no profile picture, and those that have unverified email addresses or phone numbers.
Twitter also said it is enhancing the “mute” function it launched in November, which allows users to block tweets based on specific keywords or phrases. Now, they will be able to set limits for how long they want such blocks to persist.
The company also said it is going to try and be more “open and transparent” about the process it uses to handle abuse reports and other safety issues, in an apparent response to complaints that users never knew whether anyone got their reports of harassment, and were never informed of what action had been taken.
Ho added that Twitter is trying to learn quickly from its mistakes as well — such as the recent case in which it announced a change to the way it notifies users about when they have been added to a list. It said that users would no longer be notified, but after a torrent of negative feedback, that feature was rolled back within a matter of hours.