Manila, 7 February 2022 – Twitter’s purpose is to serve the public conversation. In alignment with this year’s Safer Internet Day theme, Together for a better internet, Twitter is calling upon people to join together to make the Internet a safer and better place for all, especially for young people. In the last year, Twitter has made expansions on their policies and updated their features to help ensure that people have positive experiences while using Twitter. There will always be more to do, but the service has made meaningful progress.

Key highlights on Twitter’s Safety and Health updates include:

  • Sensitive contents can be unsettling when you encounter it without prior warnings. Twitter launched the one-time content warnings globally to be added as warnings for sensitive contents on their timelines. 
  • Twitter launched the Digital Safety playbook to help people feel safer, be in control, and manage their digital footprint. The playbook is downloadable and available in seven languages: English, French, Hindi, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish (Spain), and Spanish (Latin America).
  • Twitter has updated their Covid-19 misleading information policy to help ensure that people can  find the right information about Covid-19 on Twitter.

Twitter also expanded the #ThereIsHelp notification search prompt to provide credible information from authoritative sources to those who need it. 

Being in control of your experiences on Twitter

In the digital age, the need to have safe, inclusive, and authentic conversation has become increasingly important, and Twitter is dedicated to making people feel safer and empowering them to be in control of their experience. At times you may have not had the experience you expected, here are seven tips to help you feel safer while participating in the conversation on the service:

  1. Keep your Twitter account safe by activating two-factor authentication (2FA) to add an extra layer of protection. This will help ensure that only the account owner can access the account. 
  2. Twitter is all for the freedom of expression; and through protected Tweets, people can now share their Tweets, thoughts, and opinions with a limited number of followers. 
  3. Twitter recently rolled out the ability to have more control over who follows you. If you want to restrict an account, you can now remove them from your list of followers without blocking them (available on Twitter.com). 
  4. Twitter lets people restrict Tweets from certain accounts without unfollowing or blocking them by muting these accounts. People can also use advanced mute to mute particular words, conversations, phrases, usernames, emojis, or hashtags. 
  5. Sharing location information that could identify your home, office address or even where your children go to school must be avoided. More information can be found here. 
  6. Direct Messages allow you to have a private conversation or create a group conversation, but sometimes people receive unwanted DMs. DM settings allow you to filter out unwanted messages and limit messages from people you don’t follow. If the setting is turned off, you will only receive messages from people you follow. You can also toggle the quality filter to exclude low-quality or potentially spammy DMs.
  7. Twitter is all for self-expression, but if you find your private information, photos, or videos are being used without your consent, report it.

#WhatsHappening: Conversations on Twitter to look out for this Safer Internet Day

In the Philippines, Plan International (@Planphilippines) teamed up with Twitter to launch #NotForSale: A Safer Twitter Campaign and Resource Hub. More information about this campaign is available here. They will also host a Twitter Spaces with partners from the Down to Zero programme to combat Sexual Exploitation of Children in 12 countries across Asia and Latin America. 

To encourage conversation around safer internet use, the service has launched a special emoji which will be available until 13 February. People can activate it by Tweeting with the following hashtags, among others: #SaferInternetDay, #SID2022, #MasLigtasNaInternet, #ArawNgMasLigtasNaInternet.

Liked this post? Follow SwirlingOverCoffee on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.