Twitter continues its (belated) efforts to battle online harassment, adding new muting powers to its arsenal. After giving its users the ability to mute whole conversations they don’t want to participate in (but are probably berated in), Twitter has announced it will now let them mute specific words—including usernames—from their timelines, and not just their notifications. That’s not half bad, but wait, there’s more: as of this week, Twitter users will also be able to preemptively mute the dread egg army, i.e., accounts that have a default avatar.
Of course, this doesn’t prevent anyone from trashing you, but Twitter is also working on that. The social media platform says it is “working to identify accounts as they’re engaging in abusive behavior, even if this behavior hasn’t been reported to us.” If such a threat is determined, Twitter will limit viewing of the targeted account’s tweets to its direct followers, otherwise known as a “Twitter timeout.”