Twitter has in the past been criticized for being slow to respond to how their platform is being used for abuse by users who troll and cyberbully others. While Twitter has responded and instituted various methods, it is clear that some of their methods weren’t quite as well thought out as they should.That being said, BuzzFeed News is reporting that the social media platform has recently enacted a new protocol that is aimed at accounts that are deemed abusive. Basically if you have been found engaging in abusive behavior, Twitter will temporarily decrease your reach. What this means is that your tweets will no longer be visible to users who don’t follow you.
This also applies to retweets, meaning that if your followers are retweeting your messages in hopes of circumventing the system, those retweets will not show up either. The message that these users get when hit by the new protocol reads, “We’ve detected some potentially abusive behavior from your account. So only your follower can see your activity on Twitter for the amount of time shown below.”
So far the timer for this is set at 12 hours. We’re not sure if repeat offenses will see the length increased, or if it will just be set at 12 hour blocks. Will this be good enough to prevent abuse? We guess we’ll have to wait and see, but in the meantime there are some users who are complaining of being unfairly blocked.
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