After discussions that reportedly took more than a year, Twitter is finally rolling out the ability to mute keywords in your notifications. The move, which comes after a series of high-profile abuse incidents that may have scuttled Twitter’s effort to sell itself, could begin to shield users from some of the worst harassment they face on the platform.
Starting today, you can go into your notification settings and manually add items you would like to mute. These can include words, phrases, usernames, emoji, or hashtags. After they’re added, tweets containing the muted items will not be sent to you as push notifications or appear in your notifications tab. They may still appear in search results, however. Twitter says it will eventually bring muting to unspecified other parts of the platform.
The update also lets you mute any conversations you’ve been dragged into against your will. To leave one of these so-called “canoes,” tap the down arrow on a tweet in the conversation, tap “mute the conversation,” and you’ll stop seeing updates. (You can undo your choice later if you like.)
Twitter has also changed its harassment reporting system so that users can now more easily report “hateful conduct,” which the company defines as behavior “that targets people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease.”