The social network gives its users more tools to combat abuse, bullying and harassment.
Twitter thrives on being one of the fastest ways to see what people are talking about. But its real-time stream of news and opinion also channels abuse and hate speech, which in turn drives people off the platform altogether.
The company has long recognized the problem, but it has been slow to figure out a way to fix things. Twitter says as much in a newly published blog post: "The amount of abuse, bullying, and harassment we've seen across the Internet has risen sharply over the past few years. These behaviors inhibit people from participating on Twitter, or anywhere."
As part of a longer-term change, Twitter is expanding its mute function, which until now has been used for keeping individual Twitter users out of your stream -- which isn't that helpful if you're being harassed by multiple users or by people who create new accounts every time they're muted or suspended.
The company says the new feature works like this: "Twitter has long had a feature called 'mute' which enables you to mute accounts you don't want to see Tweets from. Now we're expanding mute to where people need it the most: in notifications. We're enabling you to mute keywords, phrases, and even entire conversations you don't want to see notifications about, rolling out to everyone in the coming days."
The company also said Tuesday that it's retrained internal support teams, which are responsible for enforcing Twitter's code of conduct and investigating reports of violations. In addition, it said it is giving users a more direct way to report hateful conduct.
Twitter acknowledged, though, that it will still have a long way to go: "We don't expect these announcements to suddenly remove abusive conduct from Twitter.
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