Twitter turns ‘safety mode’ on, new feature will autoblock accounts for abuse and harmful tweets

Social media giant Twitter will launch the new Safety Mode feature that will autoblock accounts sending harmful or abusive tweets to a user on a temporary basis. The Safety Mode feature is launching for a “small feedback group” in beta stage. The accounts for which the feature will go live are on Android, iOS, and Twitter.com with English enabled. The company plans to expand the group in the next few months.

Twitter’s Senior Product Manager Jarrod Doherty wrote in a blog post: “When the feature is turned on in your Settings, our systems will assess the likelihood of a negative engagement by considering both the Tweet’s content and the relationship between the Tweet author and replier.”

“Our technology takes existing relationships into account, so accounts you follow or frequently interact with will not be autoblocked.”

Twitter will block the accounts for seven days. However, users will be able to unblock accounts that get erroneously blocked.

The San Francisco-based company had shown off the Safety Mode during its Analyst Day presentation in February. Twitter had said at that time that it didn’t have a timeline for the feature’s public rollout.

The Safety Mode feature is Twitter’s latest attempt to cut down on abuse on its platform. It had recently introduced features such as the option to hide replies, limiting who can reply to a user’s posts, and warning before tweeting a reply that can potentially cause harm.

Despite the introduction of these features, Twitter continues to be plagued by harassment on the platform. Recently, a few Black players of the England football team suffered a barrage of racist abuse following their loss to Italy in the final of Euro 2020.

In India, too, trolls associated with IT Cells of political parties have been known to harass and bully people on their Twitter profiles.