Twitter has now taken another step towards stopping spam and abusive behavior on their social media website. On Monday, Twitter added a new feature where users will be able to disable notifications from accounts they do not know and from accounts they want to avoid communicating with. Twitter stated that with it’s “advanced filter settings” users will be able to avoid comments and accounts that they do not wish to see and that could be considered abusive.
Users will also be able to filter automated comments and notifications as well as filtering out and muting notifications containing certain words or phrases, such as curses and racial slurs. It was first stated in March that Twitter would introduce new filtering options for different accounts on Twitter as well as different posts, such as those who do not have a profile picture on them or those that only post links to other websites. Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have received major backlash because of not being able to combat cyber bullying, false news reports, and propaganda on their apps and websites.
False news reports and cyber bullying have all been a problem facing Internet comments and social media since as early back as Facebook’s launch in 2004 with the latter being the worse of the two. Posting false news reports not only spreads false information to anyone who reads or hears about it but also has a negative impact on the websites or apps where the stories are posted, Twitter and other social media platforms have faced a large amount of backlash because of it and have faced even more backlash because of the ever growing problem of cyber-bullying, seeing as the issue was especially common among teens Facebook tried to by providing an age restriction so that children under the age of 18 would not be able to create a Facebook account without first having a parent who was on Facebook, but unfortunately teenagers did find a way around this. Hopefully users will take advantage of Twitter’s new features and will prevent these incidents from happening, and other social media platforms will follow suit.
