Twitter Is Considering Developing New Anti-abuse Tools That Will Give Users Greater Control Over Their Mentions
Twitter is considering developing new anti-abuse tools that will give users greater control over their mentions
Twitter is considering adding new features to assist users who are subjected to abusive situations on the platform as a result of unwelcome attention pile-ons, such as when a tweet goes viral for no apparent reason and a flood of counter tweets are blasted their way.
Racist abuse also continues to be a significant issue on Twitter
The social media giant has indicated that it is considering giving users more control over the @mention feature in order to help them "control unwanted attention," as privacy engineer Dominic Camozzi puts it.
The issue is that when a user is directly tagged in a tweet, Twitter's notification system notifies them, drawing their attention to the content. That's fantastic if the tweet is pleasant or intriguing. However, if the content is abusive, it serves as a shortcut to ramping up hateful cyberbullying.
Twitter has labeled these latest anti-abuse ideas as "early concepts" and is encouraging users to provide feedback as the company considers potential changes.
It is considering adding the ability for users to 'unmention' themselves — that is, remove their name from another's tweet so they are no longer tagged in it (and any subsequent chatter about it will not appear in their mentions feed).
Additionally, it is considering strengthening the unmention action in instances where a user is mentioned by an account they do not follow — by providing a special notification to "highlight potential unwanted situations."
If the user then unmentions themselves, Twitter intends to disable the tweet composer's ability to tag them in the future — which appears to be a strong deterrent against strangers who abuse @mentions.
Additionally, Twitter is considering adding settings that would allow users to completely block certain accounts from mentioning them. Which sounds like it would have been quite useful during President Trump's appearance on the platform (assuming the setting could be deployed against public figures).
Also, Twitter says it is considering adding a toggle that can be flipped to prevent anyone on the platform from @-ing you for one, three, or seven days. Thus, this is a 'total peace and quiet' mode.
It says it wants to make changes in this area that will help users by preventing "the situation from escalating further" — for example, by notifying users when they receive a high volume of mentions, combined with the ability to easily review the tweets in question and adjust their settings to protect themselves (e.g. by blocking all mentions for a day or longer).
Due to the well-documented issue of online troll armies coordinating targeted attacks against Twitter users, it can take an outsized amount of effort for the target of a hate pile-on to protect themselves from the abuse of so many strangers.
Individually blocking abusive accounts or muting specific tweets is impractical when hundreds — or even thousands — of accounts and tweets are involved in the targeted abuse.
For the time being, it is unknown whether Twitter will move forward and implement the specific features demonstrated in Camozzi's thread.
According to a Twitter spokesperson, the concepts are "a design mock-up" and are "still in the early stages of design and research." However, she added, "Even at this early stage, we're excited about community feedback."
The company must determine whether the proposed features will impose additional complications on the service. (For example, what happens to automatically scheduled tweets that include the Twitter handle of someone who later toggles the 'block all mentions' setting; does the tweet cease to exist entirely or does it continue to exist but without the person's handle, potentially devoid of critical context?)
Nonetheless, these are minor details, and it is extremely encouraging that Twitter is considering ways to expand the utility of the tools users can use to protect themselves from abuse — that is, beyond the existing, albeit fairly blunt, anti-abuse features (like block, mute and report tweet).
For years, coordinated trolling attacks have been an unwelcome 'feature' of Twitter, and the company has frequently been chastised for failing to do enough to prevent harassment and abuse.
The simple fact that Twitter is still looking for ways to improve its tools for preventing hate pile-ons — in mid-2021 — is a tacit admission of its platform's broader failure to purge abusers. Despite repeated requests for action.
A Google search for "* leaves Twitter after abuse" returns numerous examples of prominent Twitter users quitting the platform in the face of waves of abuse — several from this year alone (including a number of footballers targeted with racist tweets).
Other examples date all the way back to 2013, demonstrating how Twitter has repeatedly failed to contain its abuse problem, leaving users to suffer for well over a decade at the hands of trolls (or, well, just quit the service entirely).
ChrissyTeigen, a long-time Twitter user who spent ten years on the platform, recently shut down her account in March, writing in her final tweets that she was "deeply bruised" and that the platform "no longer serves me positively as much as it serves me negatively."
This year, a number of soccer players in the United Kingdom have also been campaigning against racism on social media, organizing a boycott of services to increase pressure on companies like Twitter to address racist abusers.
While public figures are more likely to face more abusive online trolling than other types of users, the problem is not unique to those with a public profile. Racist abuse, for example, continues to be a widespread issue on Twitter. And the examples of celebrity users quitting due to abuse that are publicly available on Google are undoubtedly only the tip of the iceberg.
It goes without saying that it is detrimental to Twitter's business if highly engaged users feel compelled to abandon the service.
Conclusion
The company is aware that there is a problem. It previously stated in 2018 that it was looking for ways to improve the platform's "conversational health" — as well as, more recently, expanding its policies and enforcement surrounding hateful and abusive tweets.
Additionally, it has introduced some strategic friction in an attempt to nudge users to be more thoughtful and de-escalate outrage cycles — for example, by encouraging users to read an article before directly retweeting it.
Perhaps most significantly, it has suspended several high-profile abusers of its service — most recently, president troll Trump himself earlier this year.
Several other well-known trolls have also been booted over the years, but typically only after Twitter allowed them to continue coordinating abuse of others via its service, failing to promptly and vigorously enforce its policies against hateful conduct — allowing the trolls to see how far they could push their luck — until the very end.
By failing to address abusive use of its platform for an extended period of time, Twitter has created a toxic legacy as a result of its own mismanagement — one that continues to attract unwanted attention from high-profile users who could otherwise serve as key ambassadors for the service.
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