Twitter’s Troll-Fighting Quality Filter Is Coming For Everyone

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.

Navy Rescues Hijacked British Vessel, ‘MT VECTIS OSPREY’ Picture

The Nigerian Navy Ship NWAMBA has rescued a British registered merchant Tanker vessel with call sign MT VECTIS OSPREY from sea pirates

who attacked her 20 nautical miles offshore of Bonny. A statement from Naval headquarters signed by the Director of Information, Commodore

Christian Ezekobe said, “The rescue operation was in response to a timely alert by the International Maritime Bureau (IMB) to the Naval

Regional Maritime Awareness Centre (RMAC). “Consequently, the war ship was promptly deployed to track down and rescue the vessel. Ezekobe

said, “The British flagged MT VECTIS OSPREY departed Bonny offshore terminal and came under pirate attack on Wednesday 17 August 2016.

“NNS Nwamba engaged the attackers on approaching the vessel which made them to abandon their mission due to superior fire power. “To this

end, Naval special forces onboard the war ship embarked, and rescued the crew who locked up themselves in a citadel in the merchant tanker.

“The crew and cargo of ‘MT VECTIS OSPREY’ are safe while investigation has also commenced in order to unravel the circumstances of the

attempted hijack, especially with regard to the current trend of involvement of crew members in attacks on their own vessels”. “Additionally,

Ship owners are hereby advised to profile their crew before embarking them onboard to avoid situations in which some disgruntled crew

members stage-manage attacks on their own vessels” he said. “Consequently, the Nigerian Navy wishes to seize this opportunity to remind the

public, particularly those operating in the maritime environment that the Chief of Naval Staff Vice Admiral Ibok-Ete Ekwe Ibas is poised to

eliminate all forms of criminal activities in the maritime domain, hence several initiatives have been made in this regard” Ezekobe added. “To

mention a few, the initiatives are the conduct of ‘Operation Tsare Teku’, Choke Point Regime and the deployment of capital ships for daily patrol.

“It is worthy to note also that these measures have drastically reduced incidents of sea piracy and other crimes on our territorial waters”.