Twitter has finally taken a real step in cracking down on harassment in its neck of the internet: Variety reports that the social media platform announced new efforts to prevent bad eggs from creating new accounts with which to troll. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said (finally) that limiting abusive behavior and personal attacks is a top priority for the company; to that end, it will begin identifying people or groups that have already been permanently suspended, and then stop them from creating new accounts.
Ed Ho, Twitter’s VP of engineering, said the prevention of abusive account creation “focuses more effectively on some of the most prevalent and damaging forms of behavior, particularly accounts that are created only to abuse and harass others.” There aren’t many specifics as to how that will be achieved—our guess is some kind of find and replace for all frog emojis. Additionally, abusive and/or “low quality” tweets will be filtered out of search results, or otherwise grayed out. These new defensive measures join the muting option that rolled out last year, and are surely part of the “coming soon” tactics that Twitter promised at that time.