Twitter Is Now Hunting Down Trolls, No Report Necessary

It would seem that Twitter is finally going on the offensive with the most troubling aspect of the social media platform. Trolls are the biggest reasons for why the microblogging service has been bleeding users profusely for years. In order to staunch the bleeding, Twitter is now going after these Trolls to eliminate them even before they are reported.

The social media site made a blog post to announce its new measures to curb the abusive behavior. Twitter outlined its plans to identify accounts that repeatedly caused offense to others.

“We’re working to identify accounts as they’re engaging in abusive behavior, even if this behavior hasn’t been reported to us,” the post reads. “Then, we’re taking action by limiting certain account functionality for a set amount of time, such as allowing only their followers to see their Tweets.”

The move is already garnering the approval of several security and financial analysts. Patrick Moorhead from Moor Insights & Strategy says that it’s a good plan to reduce the number of trolls present on Twitter, Computerworld reports.

“It appears they are using machine learning to identify abusers before someone flags them or complains about them,” Moorhead said. “This will throttle abusers even before someone will even recognize they are being abused."

Although Twitter has been implementing several security changes over the past few weeks in order to finally stamp out its pest problem, it would seem that trolls simply refused to die. Among the most significant measures taken include limiting the visibility of offensive tweets, not allowing users who were not followed by others to tweet at them, and preventing the creation of new accounts by repeat offenders.

This is its most aggressive move, by far, with Twitter not even waiting for users to report abusive behavior before acting. It’s certainly a step in the right direction, but there’s no telling if it’s going to be enough.