Feeling safe on Twitter looks different for everyone. Twitter has rolled out features and settings that may help you to feel more comfortable and in control of your experience, and want to do more to reduce the burden on people dealing with unwelcome interactions.
Here’s how it works:
Safety Mode is a feature that temporarily blocks accounts for seven days for using potentially harmful language — such as insults or hateful remarks — or sending repetitive and uninvited replies or mentions.
- When the feature is turned on in your Settings, our systems will assess the likelihood of a negative engagement by considering both the Tweet’s content and the relationship between the Tweet author and replier. Twitter’s technology takes existing relationships into account, so accounts you follow or frequently interact with will not be unblocked.
For those in the feedback group, Safety Mode can be enabled through Privacy and safety under Settings.
- Authors of Tweets found by Twitter’s technology to be harmful or uninvited will be unblocked, meaning they’ll temporarily be unable to follow your account, see your Tweets, or send you Direct Messages.
“As members of the Trust & Safety Council, we provided feedback on Safety Mode to ensure it entails mitigations that protect counter-speech while also addressing online harassment towards women and journalists. Safety Mode is another step in the right direction towards making Twitter a safe place to participate in the public conversation without fear of abuse.” says @jarroddoherty, Senior Product Manager at Twitter Inc.
Twitter is also committed to the World Wide Web Foundation’s framework to end online gender-based violence and participated in a series of discussions to explore new ways for women to customize their experience with safety online using features like Safety Mode.
We’re exploring new controls called “Filter” and “Limit” that could help you keep potentially harmful content — and people who might create that content — away from your replies. These are early ideas, so we'd love your feedback pic.twitter.com/nInOMQz7WK
— Paula Barcante (@paulabarcante) September 24, 2021
What’s next?
We’ll observe how Safety Mode is working and incorporate improvements and adjustments before bringing it to everyone on Twitter. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to build on our work to empower people with the tools they need to feel more comfortable participating in the public conversation.
Do let us know if this feature is availabe to you in the UAE! We would love to hear @Itp.live.