Twitter's war on abuse has begun.
In one of its first moves in its crackdown on harassment and abusive tweets, the service is rolling out a quality filter, which removes unwanted tweets from a user's view -- though it won't be available to everyone.
[seealso slug="twitter-abuse-changes"]
Twitter hasn't made a formal announcement about the feature, but many users, including some Mashable staff, have reported seeing the option to turn on the new content filter. Twitter also confirmed to Mashable that the new filter is now rolling out to all verified users (those with the blue checkmark next to their names).
Twitter's new "quality filter" available to verified tweeters. Hope it's rolled out to all soon, and needed rarely. pic.twitter.com/0nK6kt41Fw— David Cochrane (@davidcochrane) March 24, 2015
With the filter active, users will no longer see tweets in the Notifications panel mentioning them (via @reply) that Twitter deems an abuse of the service. That could be tweets that harass users, spam users with unwanted offers, or are otherwise deemed inappropriate.
When Mashable's Jonathan Ellis (@jonathanellis) switched on the content filter, these two tweets were filtered out of his notifications.
2 verified accounts helped to turn #hashmere into a Trending Topic. These accounts were: @MartinBeck & @jonathanellis — #trndnl2015— Trendinalia USA (@trendinaliaUS) March 21, 2015
@jonathanellis Ashley's recovering in ICU-Please help bring awareness, donations needed for 5yr old Ashley's surgery http://t.co/57EuQhbvI7— G Adams (@G_Money2015) March 18, 2015
Notably, the tweets are simply removed from the user's Notifications panel in the iOS app; the filter doesn't delete the tweets, and they're still visible in the main timeline, and in other apps. The user will likely remain unaware of them, however, since he or she won't be notified about them.
If the originator leads the tweet with the user's handle -- probably the most common way an abuser would address someone on Twitter -- then the tweet won't be seen by anyone, unless they happen to be following both the tweeter and the tweetee. The abuser would presumably have no way of knowing whether the filter was in place or the other person was simply ignoring them.
It's not clear exactly what the content filter is scanning for to determine what constitutes an abuse of the service and what's a legitimate @reply. The feature will be available only for verified users, Twitter says. Previously, verified users had the option for "tailored" filtering of their notifications, and this is a modification of that setting.
The new content filter is one part of Twitter's larger effort to combat abuse on the service. Last week the company made it easier for users to report threatening tweets to police.
Last year, Robin Williams' daughter briefly left the service in the wake of abuse after her father's death and the #GamerGate controversy sparked enormous amounts of heated, harassing tweets. In early 2015, Twitter CEO conceded in an internal memo that, "We suck at dealing with an abuse," and made fighting it a top priority.
Correction: The quality filter is only available on iOS, and not in other apps or the web, as this post originally stated.