Twitter logo is displayed on a screen of a mobile device. (Photo : Bethany Clarke/Getty Images)
The new filter announced by Twitter to bypass trolls is not found to be quite useful. It does not filter data from people you are following or from accounts that you have interacted recently.
Twitter has recently announced a couple of new tools for the verified account holders to curb the harassment on its platform. Now the verified accounts have the option for "quality filter" that claims to limit notifications one attracts from people based on their previous behavior and account origins. Prime goal of the filter is to filter out hateful and abusive language from anonymous users.
A big loophole this "quality filter" comes with is its inability to give users a platform to report abuse to the company. The company has not yet shared the way it reviews such complaints. This is like keeping users ambivalent about Twitter's willingness to actually fight harassment on social platforms.
This new filter can be found in the notification setting of the Twitter account. When turned on, this "quality filter" identifies lower-quality contents like duplicate Tweets or automated contents and eliminates them from your notification and other parts of your Twitter experience, Twitter Blog mentioned.
From Twitter's front, it has not been made clear whether this "quality filter" is an automatic spam filter or it is the team of real people who manually blacklisting the abusive and "egg" accounts (without any profile picture) or it is both.
Filtering out abusive contents is not same as eliminating them from the platform. Jamilah Memieux, the Senior Editor in Ebony Magazine says "Hiding notifications from people I don't follow narrows my ability to engage."
Writer and New York based social-worker Michelle Taylor aka Feminista Jones shared her experience with Wired.com. Being a verified Twitter user, she has already switched the "quality filter" on but she is not getting much help from it. She gets the filtered content only when she accesses her account via the web or company's own mobile app. While tracking the account through some other apps, she is getting those abusive contents as usual.
It seems Twitter need to find out ways to offer its users something more effective in term of stopping harassment.
