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Twitter Rolls Out New Anti-Abuse Tools

An anonymous reader writes: After facing criticism that it gives trolls and hatemongers a platform to intimidate people, Twitter has now rolled out a new set of tools and policies to handle abusive tweets. Previously, they only prohibited threats of violence that were "direct" and "specific," but now that's been expanded to all threats of violence or tweets promoting violence. They said, "Our previous policy was unduly narrow and limited our ability to act on certain kinds of threatening behavior." Twitter has also added non-permanent bans, as well as this: "[W]e have begun to test a product feature to help us identify suspected abusive Tweets and limit their reach. This feature takes into account a wide range of signals and context that frequently correlates with abuse including the age of the account itself, and the similarity of a Tweet to other content that our safety team has in the past independently determined to be abusive." Twitter's general counsel recently said, "Freedom of expression means little as our underlying philosophy if we continue to allow voices to be silenced because they are afraid to speak up. We need to do a better job combating abuse without chilling or silencing speech."

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  1. Re:Idiots by epyT-R · · Score: 1, Troll

    Right, just like generalizing and stereotyping games and gamers as a "Choose your own patriarchal adventure" doesn't deserve all the criticism and derision it got.. Oh wait, yes it did.

    I guess I could generalize all women gamers with something like: "Women gamers must be a horde of ugly, fat, losers who can't get a boyfriend in real life, so they play online games to harass guys looking to unwind after work" because of statements made by a few women like anita and zoe quinn, but that would stoop to your level of fallacious argument and be just as untrue.