Twitter Unveils ‘Quality Filter’ to Help Combat Bullying

On Thursday, Twitter announced a new feature that’s a step in that direction, announcing a new “quality filter” feature for all users.

What this means is if a user so chooses, they can put a quality filter on what will appear in their notifications.

The San Francisco, Calif. -based social media service says the filter allows users to push out “lower-quality” content, like duplicate Tweets or content that appears to be automated.

The feature, which was already available to some users, does not block incoming tweets from accounts a user has interacted with recently or follows. Which is ideal for Twitter, since it can’t really afford to lose anyone.

We asked Twitter for more insight into the new features, including how it envisions them helping combat trolling and abuse, but were told the company has nothing to share beyond today’s blog post. Select settings, then turn on the Quality and Only People You Know filter.

The move to improve the communications lobbed in users’ directions comes after years of criticism that Twitter is awful at dealing with harassment on the platform.

To start, users will now be able to limit their notifications so they only receive notifications related to users they follow.

Rest assured that enabling it shouldn’t cause you to miss any messages you actually want to see. Twitter has responded by tweaking its policies to make it easier to report abuse, cracking down on bullying accounts, and rolling out anti-harassment tools for more than a year. Twitter retorted in a statement, saying Buzzfeed’s exposé had “inaccuracies” and “unfair portrayals”, but that the site has “a lot of work to do”.