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Twitter is working on a way to stop online harassment

If you’ve ever used Twitter, you know that the micro-blogging site can sometimes be a dark place. Harassers, trolls and racists spew vitriol on an almost daily basis and now Twitter wants to put a stop to it.

The way Twitter hopes to address this problem is through keywords according to Bloomberg. According to unnamed sources, Twitter will soon allow users to filter words from their timeline to block out any content they’d rather not see.

While this is some semblance of a solution, one has to wonder how effective it will be. For instance somebody who is really trying to grind a person’s gears might just opt to misspell certain words in order to work around the filters.

Our misgivings about the effectiveness of keywords aside, at least Twitter is making moves to curb the trolls and the constant barrage of abuse spewed by some users on the platform.

In July of this year Breitbart pundit, Milo Yiannopoulos, was banned from the site after it was alleged that he’d led a campaign of abuse at Ghostbuster’s star Leslie Jones. Yiannopoulos and his supporters cried foul accusing Twitter of censoring free-speech but the ban stuck and it’s sent a clear message to Twitter users that harassment is not welcome on its platform.

Given the immediacy of Twitter’s interface, blocking users and hashtags isn’t always a reliable method of tuning out abuse, so it’s great to see Twitter doing something to curb the behaviour of abusers on its platform.

[Via – Bloomberg] [Imnage – CC BY SA Esther Vargas]

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