In a bid to stop trolling and online harassment, Twitter is ramping up its anti-abuse measures lately. Yesterday, the company has started to restrict tweets from abusive users. Now, they have announced that you will no longer receive notifications of replies to conversations started by people you have blocked or muted.

With this change, the only notifications you will get from those threads, even if you are repeatedly @mentioned, are from people you personally follow. Twitter’s Safety account revealed the new feature on the platform, saying that it is a decision made after receiving “consistent feedback from the safety community”.

https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/832340085492191232

Being a popular social network, Twitter users have become target by abusers and bullies. However, over the past few weeks, Twitter showed that it has finally begun taking complaints about rampant abuse on its website much more seriously.

This is not the only action taken by Twitter. Yesterday, the company has taken steps restricts the tweets of abusive users, making them effectively invisible to those who do not already follow them. This effectively stops the abusive tweets from being retweeted outside of their inner circle, this measure also works with mentions too.

However, some users do not like restriction on abusive content and has started complaining about it. One person has insisted that his account was restricted simply for using a word that Twitter deemed unacceptable. The social media giant, however, states that it looks at an account’s behavior rather than simply just restricting people based on abusive language. While some will inevitably see the new protocol as anti-free-speech, for many users the new moderation system is long overdue.

I believe the decision to stop notification from blocked people and restriction on abusive content are steps in the right direction. Ed Ho, Twitter’s VP of engineering, promised to roll out “a number of product changes” addressing abuse on the website. This means we can probably expect more changes in the future if the company truly wants to squash online abuse.