It is safe to say that 2016 was a mixed bag for Twitter: while important conversations were started and awareness was raised with hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter, #EverydaySexism and #WhatAScientistLooksLike, it was also the year that a racist, sexist hate mob attempted to oust comedian and Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones from Twitter with a deliberate, sustained campaign of vile tweets.
“Making Twitter a safer place is our primary focus and we are now moving with more urgency than ever, said Ed Ho, vice president of engineering.
Amid calls for improved detection and removal of hate speech and serial harassers, Twitter is rolling out a series of improvements, the latest of which weeds out alerts to conversations containing mentions of a user but started by people that user has blocked or muted.
And user feedback is being taken pretty seriously: a recent change that meant a person wasn’t notified if they were added to a Twitter List was rolled back almost immediately when it was pointed out how user-friendly it could be, eg being added to a troll’s list of targets.
