As a platform where people express their opinions, Twitter has long been under pressure to do more to fight harassment.
To further improve previous attempts, Twitter said that it's being more proactive about flagging tweets that violate its rules against hate speech, threats and other abusive content.
The social media company said that previously, it normally used to only review abusive tweets that users reported through the flag option. Tweets that are included fell into a number of categories, including “abusive behavior, hateful conduct, encouraging self-harm, and threats, including those that may be violent.”
"People who don't feel safe on Twitter shouldn't be burdened to report abuse to us," Donald Hicks, head of Twitter's services, and David Gasca, Twitter's product lead on health, said in a blog post.
But things are changing as the company is also using AI technology to identify those abusive tweets, even before being reported.
As a result, about 38 percent of contents that violated Twitter's rules were flagged by the company using this technology.
That's an increase from zero percent during the same period in 2018.
Twitter is an underdog if compared to Facebook. But that doesn't mean that Twitter is less influential.
Facebook with more than 2 billion users has been using AI to identify offensive contents before users report them. While Facebook's AI failed numerous times, like during the New Zealand Christchurch shooting, but it's better than having none at all. Without the technology, the effort to filter contents depend on human moderators.
Considering that social media networks have millions of posts created at any given moment, policing them all should be a burden to anyone.
Here, Twitter follows Facebook's lead, hoping that it could do better in stopping harassment in the platform with 321 million monthly active users.
Using AI and algorithms, their presence is better than none at all.
"We have seen abuse, we have seen harassment, we have seen manipulation, automation, human coordination, misinformation," said Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. "These are dynamics that we were not expecting 13 years ago."
"Right now the system makes it super easy to harass and abuse others," Dorsey said.
Twitter has been criticized for being a "toxic place", especially for women. And this was also one of Dorsey's biggest worry. He acknowledges that Twitter has created a "pretty terrible situation" for women - and particularly women of color.
One of the problems with the Twitter, he said, is that it places undue weight on followers and likes.
Dorsey said if he could go back in time and re-create Twitter, he "wouldn't even have a like count in the first place."
Previously, the company has been cracking down on users who create new accounts after they've been suspended. The company said that it suspended 100,000 accounts between January and March for creating new accounts after a suspension, a 45 percent increase compared to the same period in 2018.
Read: Twitter Purges Users Who Have Previously Evaded Account Suspension