Twitter Harassment: Troll Accounts Targeted With Plan To Restrict Reach Of Abusive Users

After announcing that it was planning to take trolling more seriously, Twitter has introduced its latest tool to deal with harassment on its platform. The social network will restrict the reach of users it believes are partaking in abusive behavior.

The protocol, which started being put into effect last week, will prevent tweets from users deemed to be abusing the platform from being seen by people who don’t follow them. The tweets won’t appear in searches, Moments, or anywhere else on the platform other than their own timeline.

If a restricted user mentions someone who doesn’t follow them, that person won’t see the tweet or receive a notification about it. Retweets of abusive users from followers won’t appear to people who don’t follow the punished user.

When a user is hit with the restriction, they are alerted via email from Twitter that informs them that some features of their Twitter experience have been disabled. “We’ve detected some potentially abusive behavior from your account, so only your followers can see your activity on Twitter for the amount of time shown below,” the email reads.

The restrictions are limited in some cases, lasting for 12 hours for a first offense. Users have to acknowledge the punishment before Twitter starts counting it as being enforced. Once acknowledged, Twitter will begin the timer until the restriction is lifted.

Users who have been subjected to the temporary time out have been less than pleased, with one user threatening to leave the platform entirely over the short-term throttling of their reach.

The move has been interpreted by some critics as an attempt by Twitter to crack down on free speech on the platform. Drudge Report tweeted out, “Twitter readies speech crackdown” with a link to a story on Heat Street claiming Twitter will use the soft ban to punish people for using politically incorrect language.

The new throttling protocol is part of Twitter’s ongoing battle with abuse that takes place on its site. Earlier this month, the company announced it was ramping up its efforts to rid the platform of harassment. Twitter vice president of engineering Ed Ho said the company was “moving with more urgency than ever” to curb abuse.

Earlier this week, Twitter announced it would stop notifying users when they were added to lists on the site—a feature designed to help curate groups of people to create a limited timeline but has become a favorite tool of harassers who would place people in lists with vulgar or offensive names.

The feature was criticized as simply hiding the abuse, especially from those who were victims of it, and Twitter quickly rolled back the feature and went back to the drawing board.