According to reports, Twitter is working its way through a feature that grants the capacity to users to block some selected keywords in a bid to combat abuse. Going by these reports, Twitter has been around, holding discussions and consultations on the tool internally for about twelve months.
Although there is less certainty to what time this change will be coming in. This new feature keyword filtering shares similarity to a feature which has been added of late by Instagram. This new feature gives users the ability to shut off comments which carry some particular words from coming up on their posts. But where that would straight clean off messages, this system has that likeness to something like an expansion of Twitter’s already existing “mute” feature, which simply gives people the avenue to people to keep off seeing tweets from some selected accounts.
The report files in the possibility that users could set these filters to the task of preventing the display of tweets containing some dirty racial or gendered sentiment. This is not really the same filters Twitter has been alleged of making use of sometime past, which would actually had the capacity to keep people off from tweeting some particular keywords which could turn out offensive to another user. Truth is, the description brings in the solid prospects of this sharing an amazing similarity with the filtering systems that we already have in third-party clients like Tweetbot.
If this actually happens to be true, seeing this feature move over onto the official Twitter platform is not a bad development at all. In fact, it is not really easy to make a prediction of the number of people that could adopt it, and then how much it would improve the experience of users. This is particularly because specialized trolls can really find means to still hurting with their tweets despite the existence of keyword filtering. Though it has the promise of enhancing the usability of Twitter for a good number of people. But then, this doesn’t actually stop this from being just one piece of the anti-harassment puzzle.
