Twitter To Introduce Anti-Harassment ‘Quality Filter’ Tool

Twitter will introduce a new “quality filter” tool to the platform this week, allowing users to filter out tweets based on the “origins and behavior” of accounts.

The company announced their new tool in a blog post today, which appeared to have a broad focus on anti-harassment.

“We’re introducing some new features that will give you more control over what you see and who you interact with on Twitter, rolling out to everyone in the coming days,” announced Twitter in their blog post, which also revealed the ability to now limit notifications to only those you follow.

We’re adding another new option to your notification settings: a quality filter setting.

Last year we began testing a quality filter setting and we’re now rolling out a feature for everyone. When turned on, the filter can improve the quality of Tweets you see by using a variety of signals, such as account origin and behavior. Turning it on filters lower-quality content, like duplicate Tweets or content that appears to be automated, from your notifications and other parts of your Twitter experience. It does not filter content from people you follow or accounts you’ve recently interacted with – and depending on your preferences, you can turn it on or off in your notifications settings.

We’ve designed the feature to learn and improve over time so what we’re rolling out is just a start, and we’ll keep you posted on updates in the future.

Twitter has been at the center of censorship criticism for nearly a year now, with conservatives and libertarians frequently finding themselves restricted, banned, or suspended from the platform without reason.

Just last week it was revealed that Barack Obama’s Q&A on the social network was secretly moderated, with Twitter employees and automated systems filtering out and hiding tweets that were critical of the president, despite also claiming that the company never engages in such practices.

During July’s Republican National Convention, Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos and Matthew Boyle approached a pair of Twitter executives at their stand, asking them over and over again whether Twitter believed in free speech. After asking the question for over eight minutes, neither of the two executives were willing to answer.

Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook.