Twitter begins to crack down on abusive troll Tweets

Dick Costolo, Twitter CEO, had promised to take a strict against trolls across their platform two months ago. True to his word, he is putting his word into action. The micro blogging site has revised its abuse policy and made it tougher for trolls to inundate their site with threats, abuses and harassing messages.

A note by Costolo to his staff members had raised concern over such instances and promised to “make sure that when they issue their ridiculous attacks, nobody hears them.” Within two months, the company has revised its abuse policy and expanded it to include indirect threats and tweets that promote violence.

“Our previous policy was unduly narrow and limited our ability to act on certain kinds of threatening behavior. The updated language better describes the range of prohibited content and our intention to act when users step over the line into abuse.”

Additionally, the social site has also created a tool which will automatically flag tweets that seem likely to be abusive, based on triggers which include the age of the account and content that fits the pattern of previous tweets identified as abuse.

“This feature takes into account a wide range of signals and context that frequently correlates with abuse, including the age of the account itself, and the similarity of a tweet to other content that our safety team has in the past independently determined to be abusive,” said Shreyas Doshi, director of product management at Twitter.

This is the latest among a series of measures initiated by the site owners over the last few months to make it a safer place for their users. These come after they were under pressure from the shareholders to grow its monthly active user base.

The company has assured its users that they will continue to see content they have explicitly sought. Further, controversial or unpopular tweets will not be flagged off as abusive too.

Those sending out tweets deemed to be offensive as per the revised policy will be threatened with an account lock down for a specified period of time. They will also be asked to confirm their phone numbers and delete the messages thus flagged.