Twitter abuse: New tools will stop banned users from opening new accounts

Twitter has yet again rolled out a new set of anti-abuse tools to counter day to day harassment faced by its users. The changes include a major step of preventing troll accounts and abusive users from creating new accounts once they have been suspended.

"Making Twitter a safer place is our primary focus. We stand for freedom of expression and people being able to see all sides of any topic. That's put in jeopardy when abuse and harassment stifle and silence those voices. We won't tolerate it and we're launching new efforts to stop it," says the company in a blog post.

The company has listed three major tools in addition to the anti-abuse filter that already exist:

Banning troll/abusive suspended users from creating new profiles:This step is a major one as troll accounts could create a different account even after their main account was suspended. The company says it will focus on identifying accounts that reflect abusive behaviour online and suspend them altogether so they can't come back on the platform.

Safer search results: A 'safe search' will automatically remove tweets that contain sensitive content along with tweets from blocked and muted accounts. It will still be available on the database or the user's timeline but will not reflect on search.

Potentially abusive or low-quality tweets will be automatically removed: Such tweets will be automatically censored so the most relevant conversations are brought forward.

Chief executive Jack Dorsey had promised in a tweet last month that it was going to take "a completely new approach to abuse on Twitter, including having a more open and real-time dialogue every step of the way".

Former Twitter chief Dick Costolo recently said he deeply regretted not dealing with abuse on Twitter seriously when he was at the company. "I wish I could turn back the clock and go back to 2010 and stop abuse on the platform by creating a very specific bar for how to behave on the platform...I really feel like a lot of that is on me from six-seven years ago," said Costolo.