Twitter Lets Users Block Keywords, Hashtags, Conversations

Following the lead of Instagram and YouTube, Twitter has unveiled new ways to filter offensive and harassing tweets from your timeline.

Twitter announced that it is updating its mute feature to hide notifications that users don’t want to see.

“We’re enabling you to mute keywords, phrases, and even entire conversations you don’t want to see notifications about, rolling out to everyone in the coming days,” according to Twitter’s announcement. “This is a feature we’ve heard many of you ask for, and we’re going to keep listening to make it better and more comprehensive over time.”

Here’s everything you can mute from your Twitter notifications now:

  • Words.
  • Phrases.
  • Usernames.
  • Emojis.
  • Hashtags.

However, as noted on this help page, muting words and hashtags won’t hide these tweets from your timeline or search results.

In addition, Twitter highlighted updates to its hateful conduct policy, which aims to prevent targeting of users based on things such as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender.

Twitter promised to give users “a more direct way to report this type of conduct for yourself, or for others, whenever you see it happening. This will improve our ability to process these reports, which helps reduce the burden on the person experiencing the abuse, and helps to strengthen a culture of collective support on Twitter,” according to the announcement.

So while it’s impossible to remove abusive tweets from Twitter, it’s now at least a bit easier to hide them.

What do you think of Twitter’s new features?

Image Credit: Twitter

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