Twitter is introducing changes to its service to combat harassment this week, according to vice president of engineering at the company Ed Ho. Ho said that the company would rollout product changes that fix the mute/block feature and stop repeat offenders from creating new accounts. This week, we'll tackle long overdue fixes to mute/block and stopping repeat offenders from creating new accounts. — Ed Ho (@mrdonut) January 31, 2017 According to Ho making Twitter a ‘safer place’ is the company’s primary focus now, saying “We heard you, we didn't move fast enough last year; now we're thinking about progress in days and hours not weeks and months.” CEO Jack Dorsey also confirmed the development. Measuring our progress against abuse daily. Need to improve every day https://t.co/ZdrakWVkIW — jack (@jack) January 31, 2017 This is a remarkable departure from Twitter more traditional 3-4 times a year updates. The company, at various times, has got flak for being slow in taking down hateful content. Twitter said in November that “because Twitter happens in public and in real-time, we’ve had some challenges keeping up with and curbing abusive conduct. We took a step back to reset and take a new approach, find and focus on the most critical needs, and rapidly improve.” At the time the company started allowing users to selectively mute words, and report abuse directly. However, we had said then that Twitter’s approach shied away from censoring hateful content itself, rather leaving it up to the user to view the…
