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Twitter Announces Steps to Curb Abuse


FILE - A portrait of the Twitter logo in Ventura, California.
FILE - A portrait of the Twitter logo in Ventura, California.

Twitter says it is stepping up efforts to prevent “abuse and harassment” on its microblogging platform.

On Tuesday, the company announced several steps it is taking.

First, Twitter says it will identify people who have been banned for online abuse and prevent them from creating new accounts.

Additionally, the company says it will create a “safe search” feature so that "tweets that contain potentially sensitive content and tweets from blocked and muted accounts" will be removed from search results. Those tweets will still exist, but Twitter says they will not clutter search results any longer.

The company also says it will begin “identifying and collapsing potentially abusive and low-quality replies so the most relevant conversations are brought forward.”

Twitter has been failing to keep up with other social media platforms such as Facebook. Twitter recently reduced staff and an attempt to sell the company failed.

The 10-year-old Twitter has never made a profit, and despite tweaks to the format, has continued to see its user base shrink.

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