Twitter launches Safety Mode to address harassment towards women and journalists

Twitter introduced Safety Mode, a new feature that aims to “reduce disruptive interactions” by temporarily blocking accounts for seven days for “using potentially harmful language”. Safety Mode aims to protect counter-speech while also addressing online harassment towards women and journalists. 

“Unwelcome Tweets and noise can get in the way of conversations on Twitter, so we’re introducing Safety Mode, a new feature that aims to reduce disruptive interactions,” wrote Jarrod Doherty for Twitter.

Safety Mode will temporarily block accounts for using potentially harmful language—like insults or hateful remarks, or sending repetitive and uninvited replies or mentions—for seven days. To enable Safety Mode, you will be able to go to Settings, then Privacy and Safety. Toggling the option will “autoblock” those sketchy accounts for the week, but you’e still able to interact with accounts that you follow or often interact with.

Accounts deemed “harmful or uninvited” by Twitter will be temporarily unable to follow your account, see your Tweets, or send you Direct Messages. You’ll be able to find information about flagged Tweets through Safety Mode and view details of the blocked accounts. Additionally, you’ll receive a recap of the information before each Safety mode period ends.

“We won’t always get this right and may make mistakes, so Safety Mode autoblocks can be seen and undone at any time in your Settings. We’ll also regularly monitor the accuracy of our Safety Mode systems to make improvements to our detection capabilities,” said Doherty.

Introducing something like this to users can be great help for people who need it, mainly for female public figures. Celebrities like Kelly Marie Tran was harassed so much on Twitter in the months after The Last Jedi, she ended up leaving social media altogether.

“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,” wrote Article 19, a human rights organisation that provided expertise to the platform about online safety, mental health, and human rights.

Although this sounds like a good small step towards making Twitter a safer platform, harassment continues to be a major problem on the platform. There had recently been racist abuse against Black players on England’s football team following their Euro 2020 championship loss.

Twitter is rolling out the safety feature to a small feedback group on iOS, Android, and Twitter.com. They will first start with accounts that have English-language settings enabled.

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