MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Twitter updated its "unduly narrow" violent threats policy and set a new tool to combat abuse on its platform, a Twitter representative said in a statement Tuesday.
"We are today announcing our latest product and policy updates that will help us in continuing to develop a platform on which users can safely engage with the world at large. […] Our previous policy was unduly narrow and limited our ability to act on certain kinds of threatening behavior," Director of Product Management Shreyas Doshi said in a statement.
Twitter also said it began to use a new feature that automatically identifies abusive tweets and temporarily suspends accounts to prevent people from being exposed to harmful messages.
The filtered tweets will not be deleted and will still exist on the service, but the targeted user will not see the harassment.
Twitter’s renewed efforts to tackle abuse come just two weeks after company's chief executive Dick Costolo on Twitter’s internal forum admitted the company's failure to deal with abuses and promised to take stronger action to eliminate existing problems.
The company’s changes come after other recent updates to Twitter's violent threats policy in December, February and March following the users' complaints that the company does too little to address abusive tweets.