Summary
Harassment and abuse on social media is a major problem. Fortunately, it is a problem that social media companies are taking seriously. Twitter has recently rolled out some new features that can help curb harassment and abuse. Here are some of those features.
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Transcript
Twitter can be a great place to express your feelings, but the open nature of the site can also leave you open to harassment. While you can and should take the time to block and report harassers, there are several tools you can use to stop harassment before it even gets to you. Here are three of those tools that are available on Twitter.
For Personal Tech Media, this is Two Minute Tech. I’m Jim Herman.
First, enable Twitter’s Safety Mode. Safety Mode is a tool for users to stop harassment and toxic posts on the platform. Safety Mode will block accounts that reply to your posts with harmful language or insults. For seven days following a flagged comment, the person will not be able to follow your account, see your tweets, or send direct messages. This blocking usually happens automatically, so in most cases, you won’t even see the abusive messages.
Second, limit who can reply to your tweet. With every tweet that you send, you can limit replies to anyone, only the people you follow, or only the people you mention. There isn’t a specific option to not allow any replies, but you can accomplish it by setting it to only those mentioned and then not mentioning anyone in the tweet.
And third, if someone mentions you in a tweet, you can now unmention yourself. Twitter began testing this feature early last year, and the site rolled it out to everyone in July. Twitter says this feature is intended to prevent unwanted attention that can lead to harassment. If you do choose to unmention yourself in a conversation, Twitter will also block your account from being mentioned in that thread again.