Mumbai: Finally, there is a ray of hope for those facing harassment on Twitter or are being continuously trolled. Twitter’s newest test could provide some relief to them. Twitter is about to introduce a feature called ‘Safety Mode’. It will be a temporary line of defence for those who are continuously abused. This mode can be enabled from the settings menu and it will act as a filter for abuse for a minimum of seven days.
Twitter is hoping that with this new feature it will be able to crack down on trolling and abuse. Both have become huge issues for the platform. The ‘Safety Mode’ will immediately flag accounts notorious for sending hateful and uninvited comments. These accounts will then be blocked for seven days. The feature will work automatically once enabled. Twitter said that the new ‘Safety Mode’ will be tested on a small group of users.
The main intention to implement the mode is to stop hate speech according to Twitter officials. “Our goal is to protect in a better manner the individual on the receiving end of tweets by reducing the prevalence and visibility of harmful remarks,” Twitter product lead Jarrod Doherty was quoted as saying by ‘techcrunch.com’.
Like other social media platforms, Twitter relies on a combination of automated and human moderation to prevent abuses and hate speech. While Twitter has never formally said how many human moderators it uses, a 2020 report by New York business school ‘NYU Stern’ suggested that it had about 1,500 to cope with the 199 million daily Twitter users worldwide.
“While we have made strides in giving people greater control over their safety experience on Twitter, there is always more to be done. ‘Safety Mode’ is a feature that allows you to automatically reduce disruptive interactions on Twitter,” said another senior official of the company.
A recent study on hate speech produced by ‘Facts Against Hate’ on behalf of the Finnish government found that Twitter was ‘the worst of the tech giants’ when it came to hate speech.
