After a slew of bad press about the ease with which trolls use Twitter to attack famous comedians (and slightly less bad press about the ease with which trolls use it to attack non-famous people, usually women and minorities), the social media platform announced on Thursday that it was implementing new controls that will give users the ability to filter out “non-quality” tweets from their timelines.
What this means is if a user so chooses, they can put a quality filter on what will appear in their notifications. Twitter says the filter uses “a variety of signals” to determine “lower quality” tweets from users they don’t follow—like spam and abuse.
As The Verge points out, this quality filter has been available to verified accounts for quite some time, and now it will be available to the checkmark-less plebes as well.
What it won’t do is stop the abuse from actually happening in the first place—just make it easier for the target to avoid seeing it. This gives Twitter the best of both worlds and is just about the least it could do: It doesn’t have to crack down on and risk alienating its troll user base, and the users who are frequent targets of those trolls can remain blissfully ignorant of their behavior and not be driven away. Which is ideal for Twitter, since it can’t really afford to lose anyone.
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