Social media platforms have become an integral part of our daily life. Apart from helping us get updated about what is happening around us with just a click, they also leave behind several bitter side effects. There have been debates over the effect that social media bullying has on people, which sometimes even drive them to cause take extreme measures Social media platforms themselves have admitted that it is indeed a growing concern and they are now coming up with methods to ward off these menaces.
Twitter has decided that from now on it will put more emphasis on algorithms to monitor what is being posted on their platform and to determine if the users are following the rules and guidelines. This will help them to take action against the miscreants after users have reported them for posting content for possible violation of rules.
When the algorithm technology identifies an account that can or is engaging in abusive behaviour, Twitter will then limit the functionality of these accounts for an unspecified amount of time and also allow only followers to see that user's tweets.
Ed Ho, vice president of engineering at Twitter, wrote in a blog post. "We aim to only act on accounts when we're confident, based on our algorithms, that their behaviour is abusive."
Another important step that Twitter has taken is to allow it's users to "mute" words that they do not want to see from their notifications as well as on their timeline. The users can opt between muting these words for an indefinite period of time and for a short while. An extension to this feature is that the users can now also mute accounts that still use the default Twitter "egg" and have not uploaded their own images and also the ones that don't have confirmed email addresses or phone numbers.
