By Chris Williamson-
Twitter has announced its acquisition of an online safety mechanism via a U.S-based online safety firm Smyte.
The social media giant announced that the move was its latest step to improve the health of conversation on the platform, and would help them to make Twitter safer. This announcement is a huge leap in the former lax state of security and safety measures online.San Francisco-based Smyte specialises in tools that help to fight online abuse, spam and fraud.
“Smyte’s team, technology and company mission are aligned with our focus on improving the health of conversation on Twitter, and we believe this will be a powerful addition to our ongoing work,” Twitter said.
From ensuring safety and security at some of the world’s largest companies to specialised domain expertise, Smyte’s years of experience with these issues brings valuable insight to our team.
“The Smyte team has dealt with many unique issues facing online safety and believes in the same proactive approach that we’re taking for Twitter: stopping abusive behaviour before it impacts anyone’s experience.
“We can’t wait until they join our team to help us make changes that will further improve the health of the public conversation
In 2017, Twitter had announced plans to broaden its efforts to protect its users from abuse and harassment, including stopping banned users from creating new accounts and a new “safe search” feature after coming under fire for failing to address hate and abuse on the site since it was founded a decade ago. The social media giant has been exploring new avenues to create a “safe search” feature that removes tweets with potentially sensitive content. Included in this particular search was the aim of twitter to remove tweets from blocked and muted accounts from search results. The tweets will still exist on Twitter if people look for them, but they will not appear in general search results.
Twitter has been repeatedly criticised for its handling of abuse and offensive content on the site, and has pledged to take several steps to combat it.
Earlier this year Twitter founder and chief executive Jack Dorsey announced focus would also be placed on improving the general health of conversations taking place on the site, and launched tools which demote posts that are identified as disruptive but do not necessarily violate the site’s terms of service or class as abuse. Mr Dorsey said at the time the firm would look to work with third-party companies as part of this process.
Twitter said Smyte’s products would now be integrated into Twitter’s own review system to help strengthen its operations and the technology it uses to monitor the platform.