Ever since its failed acquisition talks last year, Twitter has been leading an anti-abuse campaign on its platform. In the process, Twitter has launched new features while making necessary adjustments to existing ones to punish trolls. But today, Mashable has spotted that the micro-blogging platform has started marking entire profiles as to containing ‘sensitive’ content.
This surprising (yet unconfirmed!) change in Twitter’s content policies is being witnessed across numerous accounts on the platform. Clicking on a profile which has been marked ‘sensitive’ blocks the profile+header images and tweets from being viewed by the user. It displays a warning messages reading – “Caution: This profile may include potentially sensitive content.”
It is further underscored by another warning label, doling out the reason for censoring the profile. It says that the said person’s profile contains tweets with sensitive images or language. But, you have been provided with a button ‘Yes, view profile’ to enable you to access to that person’s sensitive tweets — even when they might not really indulge in doing so. Also, what’s unusual about this feature is that the user isn’t being intimated about his profile being marked as sensitive.
@jpwarren did you know Twitter has marked your account as maybe containing sensitive content? Appears like this for a colleague, not for me pic.twitter.com/ToQyhotydL
— Ariel Bogle (@arielbogle) March 9, 2017
While this was first spotted by Mashable’s Ariel Bogle on another technology journalist Justin Warren’s profile, but a similar behavior has been spotted by other Twitter users as well. This profile censoring feature holds a resemblance to the sensitive media feature that has long existed on the platform. The latter is quite common and can be enabled if you’re want to censor tweets with violence, abuse, and nudity. But, the former seems like a fresh roll out.
The timing for the appearance of this feature is quite significant as Twitter is currently cracking down on abuse. It has already stated that hate speech, abuse or even bullying could lead to 12-hour temporary bans. Also, the reach of their tweets would be stunted only to reach those who follow him/her. And if this doesn’t even work out, then the company plans to permanently ban users from using its service. It will also prevent the creation of abusive accounts, provide safer search results and introduce new measures to completely curb the problem.
There is currently no confirmation on whether Twitter is rolling out the said change or it came in tow with recent anti-abuse tools. We have reached out to Twitter for more information and will update you once we hear back from them.
