Twitter rolls out new tools to combat abuse, cyberbullying after months of criticism

(Reuters) – Twitter, facing pressure for not doing enough to curb abusive behavior on its platform, said on Tuesday it would upgrade some features to better combat cyber-bullying.

The company said it would expand the “mute” option to allow users to block tweets based on keywords, phrases and the content of conversations from a user’s notifications .The “mute” option currently allows users to block tweets from accounts.

READ MORE: Twitter updates rules on banned content, abusive behaviour

The change will be rolled out to all users in the coming days, Twitter said in a blog post.

“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,” read the blog post.

“We don’t expect these announcements to suddenly remove abusive conduct from Twitter. No single action by us would do that. Instead we commit to rapidly improving Twitter based on everything we observe and learn.”

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Twitter, which has struggled to strike a balance between free expression and blocking violent and hateful speech, has come under increasing criticism following complaints from users that they have been the target of abuse.

In July, Twitter permanently banned some user accounts for harassment after Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones left the site, saying she had faced severe harassment.

READ MORE: ‘Ghostbusters’ star Leslie Jones highlights rampant racist abuse on Twitter

Twitter said it would provide “a more direct way” for users to flag abusive content, but didn’t give details.

The company also said it had improved internal controls to deal more effectively with abusive conduct reported by users.