Social media can be an awesome thing. I love using it to stay in touch with family and friends who live forever away, but for as awesome as social media can be, it can also be horrible. A dark hole filled with ugly people.

I don’t know what your experience has been like, but I can tell you that I’ve been on the receiving end of some very unwarranted hate from people who had nothing better to do than hide behind their screen and attack me because they clearly weren’t adult enough to have a grown up conversation. The hate that was unnecessarily thrown on me didn’t only hurt, but in once case, it scared me enough that I kept looking over my shoulder. Nobody should ever have to live with that sort of fear.

It’s taken a decade, but according to USA Today, Twitter is finally doing something to combat online hate and harassment. I don’t know if it’s because the company has been under fire for not doing more to stop online abuse, or if they finally realized what a huge problem it is, but the fact is, they’re working on putting a throttle on people who are out of line.

Twitter has released new ways to sort out abusive content and then place restrictions on the accounts of those users who’ve crossed the line. One of the restrictions will make it so that tweets from flagged accounts will only be visible to those who follow them, or people who take the time to search for their account.

With this new technology, Twitter will be able to identify accounts of those crossing the line, even if nobody else has reported them for hate and harassment.

[via USA Today]

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