2017 has unfortunately been the year of harassment, and social media networks are ramping up their efforts to ensure that their online communities are safe from harm.
Facebook has just released a series of updates that focus around two main areas: First, proactively protecting members from potential online harassers, and second, making sure that you’re in better control of your message inbox.
Facebook has been collecting feedback from users, and also working with specialists and groups that traditionally face an increased harassment threat, to put the new updated tools in motion.
To proactively prevent serial harassment, Facebook is updating its toolkit to identify fake and inauthentic accounts, possibly coming from harassers signing up using a different account. Facebook will be using various signals, such as IP address filtering, to better distill and block such attempts.
To ensure that no harasser gets in touch with a person, the social network will also give the opportunity to users to ignore messages. As Facebook says: “If someone is being harassed, blocking the abuser sometimes prompts additional harassment, particularly offline.” From now on, users can can tap on a message to ignore the conversation. This disables notifications, and moves the conversation from inbox to Filtered Messages folder.
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