New updates and tweak to combat trolling

Twitter has not always been the best at stopping threats and abuse but is now taking a step to fix it.

Twitter updated its violent threats policy on Tuesday to include the types of threatening and inappropriate content it will crack down on. The initial policy disallowed “direct, specific threats of violence against others.” The new one however, drops the words “direct” and “specific” – a change that lets Twitter’s abuse team to expand the net to threats that aren’t as targeted.

The new policy is vague by design so Twitter’s moderators can have more freedom to interpret the tweet’s context. The policy is against “threats of violence against others or promoting] violence against others.”

Twitter also added new features that discourage bullies. The first of such features is an account “freeze”, which is essentially a timeout in which a troll or person who threatens/tweets inappropriately will not have access to their account for a certain period of time.

Twitter is also experimenting with new algorithms intended to identify inappropriate or threatening content and keep them from appearing on a user’s notification timeline.

Twitter has always failed woefully, in the past, to deal with these elements, partly because of the network’s anonymity factor.

Back in February, Twitter CEO Dick Castolo had even sent an internal memo to employees taking blame for the site’s failure to put an end to such behavior.

“We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years,” he wrote in the memo. “It’s no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.”

Twitter also has abuse issues to deal with on its new livestreaming service, Periscope, and may even have to deal with more issues now that there’s a change to its direct messaging tool.