A fairly straightforward solution to Twitter’s harassment issues
It strikes me that there is a fairly simple solution to Twitter’s harassment issues: Simply allow users to filter @ replies by a combination of certain criteria, such as limiting replies to:
- Accounts you follow
- Accounts who are followed by accounts you follow
- Accounts with more than than ___ followers
- Tweets with more than ___ retweets
- Tweets with more than ___ favorites
- Accounts more than ___ days old
On the other hand, here are criteria on which a user can specify for muting (either for a specified period of time or permanently):
- Accounts who follow a particular account (e.g. a troll leader)
- Tweets containing specific words (e.g. racial or gender slurs)
- Accounts who have tweeted specific words in their last ___ tweets
A user could calibrate these settings however they like, set to to filter any one, a certain number, or all of these criteria (or if you want to get really fancy, allow weighting of each category and require tweets meet a certain threshold of points). Any @ replies or tweet quotes not meeting those criteria would never appear in their notifications. This filtering tool would solve most issues of prominent users receiving torrents of hate-filled troll tweets from an army of egg avatar accounts with fewer than 10 followers.
Troll tweets largely exist merely to provoke a response from the user, but just knowing a user can see them (and has little means to filter them out) is also a driving force behind their existence. In the current Twitter configuration, troll tweets are hopelessly mixed with credible/relevant responses the user would actually like to see, rendering the @ reply page as useless as a used clothing store not organized in any way by size. Unlike the clothing store, though, Twitter is digital, and simple automated filter settings could easily solve this sorting issue.
