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Facebook has rolled out a series of new features that will tackle its harassment issues.
As with any other social media platform, Facebook is plagued with harassment and bullying situations that have forced the company to tackle these issues head-on. Thus, the company has announced on Tuesday that it will introduce new tools to prevent unwanted friend requests and messages.
“We’ve heard stories from people who have blocked someone only to encounter the same harasser using a different account,” Facebook’s Global Head of Safety, Antigone Davis, wrote in a blog post.
Davis has said that Facebook has been working on building upon their existing features to prevent fake and inauthentic accounts from affecting the user’s experience.
A common example of harassment on the platform is when a person you blocked makes another account so they can contact you. Facebook’s new tools will recognize that user regardless of how many accounts he or she has and will prevent them from sending a message or friend request to their potential victim.
Facebook states that the company will be able to recognize these multiple accounts by using information such as a person’s internet protocol address. Their current prevention tools for catching fake and inauthentic accounts don’t always detect blocked users who create another account, the company admitted.
Facebook currently boasts over 2 billion users and have been a breeding ground for unwanted messages from unblocked users as well. As a result, the tech giant has also released a feature to ignore conversations by disabling the notification for that chat. The conversation would then be moved to the filtered messages folder.
According to Facebook, once that conversation gets moved into the messages folder, users can read the conversation without the sender being able to know if they’d read it. The feature is currently available for individual messages with a group message add-on being available soon, the company has said.
In the blog post, David states that Facebook consulted with a number of experts from a variety of field to improve the digital platform’s safety features. These include the National Network to End Domestic Violence as well as several women and journalists who have experienced harassment on the platform.
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