Twitter: It’s one of our favorite social media sites. Unfortunately, though, many users have a love/hate relationship with this platform because of its constant influx of trolls and bullies. If Twitter can learn anything from its past 11 years of being a top social media platform, it’s that the users want a more effective and reliable reporting system. Check out the newest Twitter updates of 2017 that have mostly been a response to people’s need to block abusive profiles.
New Twitter Updates You Can’t Miss
Kicking harassment in the teeth
Twitter harassment is a real issue. It’s been that way since Twitter hatched. And unfortunately, users have complained about receiving little intervention from the creators of Twitter. However, in March of this year, they finally acted.
After receiving many requests to update Twitter features and functions and suspend accounts that were only created to troll, spam, or spread hate, Twitter’s creators and administrators developed a plan to try to end this abuse.
Twitter’s plan to end harassment included the following features:
- Notification filtering: Users can now choose which types of accounts they’d like to receive notifications from and filter out users without a profile photo or unverified accounts.
- Muting content: Twitter users can mute keywords or phrases they don’t want to see on their feed and choose how long to mute that content.
- A more transparent reporting system: Twitter will start notifying users if they decide to take action on a reported profile.
- Twitter timeout: If a user has been flagged for abusive content, their tweets become temporarily unable to view by non-followers.
- Ending the spam accounts: Twitter created an algorithm to stop users from creating multiple accounts meant to spam and harass other users. They can now track users attempting to use the same email addresses and phone numbers to make extra accounts and stop them from doing so.
Censoring “sensitive” content
Also in March of 2017, Twitter started to flag profiles that may contain “sensitive” content. In your profile settings, if you chose that you do not want to see suggestive content in your feed, you will now begin to see these profiles being censored.
When a user clicks on a “sensitive” profile, they will not be shown tweets immediately. Instead, they will see a warning message in a pop-up that says “Caution: This profile may include sensitive content.” Then, the user must confirm that they’re okay with seeing potentially offensive stuff by clicking “Yes, view profile.”
Twitter is pretty vague when they describe what type of content is considered troublesome. Their terms and conditions state they’ll flag “pornography or excessive violence in live video, or in your profile image or header image” Although creators probably meant well with these Twitter updates, it kind of backfired.
Users were getting flagged and didn’t know why. From regular users to even verified journalists, this update quickly became another complaint. The feature was tested in March. But, due to the complaints, there’s no telling whether or not Twitter will continue using this feature on a wider scale.
And finally, Twitter features for businesses and the average Joe
Now that we’ve got the more controversial Twitter updates out of the way, let’s talk about some Twitter features and functions that might be more useful for social media marketing and regular users.
Twitter recently introduced in-stream video ads to go along with video content. Advertisers can now partner with various publishers who are dishing out content on Twitter. These ads can allow the publisher to get more views and advertisers to get their message to a wider audience.
Also, Twitter tested out 140-character replies. Users will no longer be limited when they reply to other users, as the handles of users you tweet at will not count towards your 140-character limit. Sounds great, but these Twitter updates were kind of a fail, as abusive users began sending tweets to up to 50 users at once, spamming them. And of course, the victims couldn’t remove themselves from the thread of tweets.
Last, Twitter introduces Twitter Lite. It’s meant to solve issues of slow connections or using too much data. Twitter Lite minimizes data usage, loads more quickly on a slow connection, and takes up less storage. In data save mode, users will see only a blurred preview of photos and videos, which you have to click on if you decide to view it.
We Know Our Stuff, Our Twitter Stuff
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