The End of Twitter Eggs Is Here

In a continuing effort to crack down on abusive users and harassment on the site, Twitter will now let you mute all users who don’t have avatars or you may know them as eggs.

Twitter today has unveiled a new set of tools requested by many anti-harassment advocates that could go far to keep trolls out of people’s feeds, relying on both automation and user preference to filter out abuse. “We’re continuing our work to make Twitter safer, moving faster than ever to do so,” says Ed Ho, Twitter’s vice president of engineering, sounding the note the company desperately wants a wary public to hear.

Twitter says it has developed algorithms that can detect when an account engages in abusive behavior—for instance, if it repeatedly tweets at non-followers. The company says it will start to limit the reach of the tweets from those flagged accounts. During this Twitter time out, only the followers of the account can see what these users have said. Twitter may enforce this penalty even when no one has reported these accounts as potentially abusive. (The company has tested this approach in the past but now plans to apply it more widely.)

Finally, Twitter says it’s improving on its abuse reporting process, adding progress updates in a user’s notifications tab. These will include both complaints users have made for themselves and on the behalf of others. on your own harassment or reports you bring to Twitter about others’ harassment.