Twitter debuts ‘quality filter’, but what does it do?

Twitter has been hard at work over the past few months, delivering everything from bigger GIFs and Snapchat-style stickers to 140-second videos and better harrassment reporting tools. Now, the company has zeroed in on notifications, launching two new features in this regard.

The first feature allows you to only get notifications for people you follow, while the second option brings a “quality filter” into the fray.

“Don’t want to see notifications from everyone? Starting today, everyone will have the ability to limit notifications to only people they follow on mobile and on twitter.com. Simply turn it on if you want to give it a go. If not, no worries – your individual Twitter experience will continue unchanged,” the company wrote in a blog post.

The quality filter has been in testing since last year, but the company is finally ready to expand the feature.

“When turned on, the filter can improve the quality of tweets you see by using a variety of signals, such as account origin and behaviour. Turning it on filters lower-quality content, like duplicate Tweets or content that appears to be automated, from your notifications and other parts of your Twitter experience,” Twitter explained.

Twitter’s new feature lets users limit notifications to only people they follow

“It does not filter content from people you follow or accounts you’ve recently interacted with – and depending on your preferences, you can turn it on or off in your notifications settings.”

Fighting extremism and threats

Twitter also provided an update on its efforts to combat extremism on its network. Earlier this year, it revealed that it’s suspended over 125 000 accounts for promoting violent threats and/or extremism.

“While our work is not done, today we are announcing that we have suspended an additional 235 000 accounts for violating our policies related to promotion of terrorism in the six months since our February 2016 post. This brings our overall number of suspensions to 360 000 since the middle of 2015. As noted by numerous third parties, our efforts continue to drive meaningful results, including a significant shift in this type of activity off of Twitter,” the company explained.

Twitter claimed that daily suspensions are up 80% since last year, seeing spikes immediately after major terror attacks.

“Our response time for suspending reported accounts, the amount of time these accounts are on Twitter, and the number of followers they accumulate have all decreased dramatically. We have also made progress in disrupting the ability of those suspended to immediately return to the platform.”