Twitter Rolls Back Their Newly Launched Anti-Abuse Tool

So we know that after facing a ton of backlash from its users, Twitter is finally working on making its platform less prone to abuse amongst its users. In fact recently the company announced a new tool that was meant to prevent abuse, but unfortunately it seems to have had the opposite effect, so much so that Twitter has decided to roll the feature back for now.

For those unfamiliar, yesterday Twitter Safety announced, “We want you to get notifications that matter. Starting today, you won’t get notified when you are added to a list.” Prior to this, users would get notifications when added to lists, so what trolls and bullies would do is create mean lists and add users to them, thus notifying them in the process, which obviously is a bad thing.

We suppose maybe Twitter had the idea that “ignorance is bliss”, but many of their users are saying that this move was a bad idea. A tweet by Swift On Security suggested that this move is “blinding the vulnerable”, where just because someone doesn’t know they are being abused or talked about behind their backs doesn’t mean that it is happening.

However like we said, the backlash to this new feature was so bad that Twitter has since rolled it back, with the company’s VP of Engineering Ed Ho saying that it was a “misstep”. Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey also added that “we’re reverting and debugging what led us here.”

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Twitter