Jul 11, 2017

Twitter adds new machine learning filters to tackle trolls

BYPankaj Mishra

In a fresh bid to tackle trolls spewing hateful content on its platform, microblogging platform Twitter has added filters to mute unwanted tweets from a user’s feed.
Twitter is reportedly augmenting the new filters with machine learning.
Users may now mute notifications from newly registered accounts and those accounts that don’t follow them.
These filters have been added to the ones Twitter released in March this year. They let you mute users whom you don’t follow, those who have a default profile photo, those who haven’t confirmed their email or those that haven’t confirmed their phone number.
To enable these filters, a user must access the ‘Advanced filters’ option from the ‘Settings’ on the ‘Notification’ timeline.
“If your account receives a lot of sudden attention, we may insert a notification in your ‘Notifications’ tab, inviting you to adjust these filters to give you more control over what you see,” said Twitter in a blog post on Tuesday.
The new filters to mute certain accounts along with the features to mute words or phrases provided by Twitter will enable a user to hide disturbing posts from their feed, but don’t eliminate such content from the platform entirely.
The moment Twitter detects that accounts are repeatedly tweeting at accounts that they don’t not follow, or engaging in unspecified other activities likely to signal abuse, the company will temporarily limit their access to the platform.

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Pankaj Mishra is a writer of FactorDaily.