Twitter is beginning to roll out a “safety mode” that aims to better protect their users against online harassment and bullying, the social network has announced.
Safety mode, which is currently rolling out to a few select users this month, is an optional setting found in a user’s Privacy and Safety settings that, if enabled, will try and seek out negative engagement aimed towards the user and autoblock the accounts responsible for seven days.
A recent blog post by Twitter said that the Safety Mode will help protect a user by searching for “negative engagement” directed at them, which will work by “considering both the Tweet’s content and the relationship between the Tweet author and replier.”
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Essentially this means the mode will analyse the content of a ‘reply’ tweet or ‘mention’ tweet to see if it contains hateful content, as well as analyse the relationship of the person who made the tweet to the user with Safety Mode enabled. It will also look for repetitive replies or mentions.
If the mode finds content it deems negative, it will automatically block the Twitter account responsible for it on the user’s behalf, meaning the user will no longer be able to see the offending account or its tweets, for seven days.
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However, since the mode will take into consideration the relationship between users, its unlikely the mode will autoblock the accounts of close friends and family, since a user will presumably interact with those accounts more frequently.
It is Twitter’s latest attempt to curb online harassment and cyber bullying that the site is often criticised for facilitating, with many claiming it is among the worst offenders for abuse and hate speech.
The option is available for a small amount of English-speaking accounts currently, and if successful the option will rollout to a wider audience soon.