Twitter’s upcoming Safety Mode feature, which is designed to automatically detect and block trolls from your timeline, was this week expanded to more users in many English speaking countries before it rolls out to everyone.
Safety Mode first entered beta with a limited number of testers last September. It is now available to around half of all users in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and more as Twitter looks to “collect more insights” on how well it’s working.
More Twitter users now have Safety Mode
Safety Mode is one of a number of steps Twitter has taken in recent years to crack down on trolls and harassment. It comes after scrutiny of the network, which one study described as a “toxic place,” reached a peak in 2018.
The feature limits “unwelcome interactions” in your timeline by recognizing potentially harmful behavior — such as offensive language and repeated replies and mentions — and then automatically blocking the users responsible.
Safety Mode is intelligent enough to identify people you often interact with and avoid blocking them, and as things stand, its bans are temporary for seven days, though you can change that. And now Safety Mode is expanding its reach.
Twitter this week confirmed that the feature, which is still in beta at the moment, is now rolling out to around 50% of all users in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand.
Safety Mode gets even safer
The expansion will help Twitter “collect more insights on how Safety Mode is working and explore ways to incorporate additional improvements,” the company said in a statement to CNET.
Twitter is also bolstering the feature by adding Proactive Safety Mode prompts. When it detects potentially harmful behavior in your mentions and replies, it will ask you if you want to enable Safety Mode if you don’t already have it turned on.
“We’ve learned that some people want help identifying unwelcome interactions,” Twitter said. “For this reason, our technology will now proactively identify potentially harmful or uninvited replies and prompt people in the beta to consider enabling Safety Mode.”
Twitter hasn’t yet confirmed when Safety Mode is scheduled to roll out to everyone.
