Twitter hinted last week that it would soon more thoroughly address the issues of safety and abuse on its network, and today it has announced a series of changes to its service as a result. The company says that it will now stop the creation of new, abusive accounts, offer safer search results, and collapse abusive or low-quality tweets.
Often, people who create abusive accounts on Twitter return time and again, setting up new accounts under different usernames.
Twitter this morning says it’s now working to identify those permanently suspended accounts whose primary purpose is to abuse and harass others, and stop them from creating new accounts on its service. This would effectively cut down on online trolling, where it becomes a game of whack-a-mole to silence the handful of abusers who keep returning. It would also make getting permanently suspended more of a dead-end, rather than a mere inconvenience.
